Crosstown Traffic: Finding room at the most congested airports

Feeling the squeeze

O’Hare and Atlanta are obvious ex­amples, but almost all airports in the United States are old and equally land-constrained said Erin Gruver, ex­ecutive vice-president of development and acquisitions at Aeroterm, which specializes in airport facilities, primarily in the U.S. and Canada. To overcome the lack of room to spread out, old buildings are being demolished to make room for new facilities. Aeroterm recently completed an 800,000-square-foot facility at Miami International on a redeveloped site in the Northeast corner of the airport. Although 300,000 square feet are designated for hangar space, the rest is for air cargo, and has been leased to Centurion Cargo.

Back in Chicago, Aeroterm demol­ished the old National Guard Base, which was sitting fallow on O’Hare’s footprint, to make room for a 1 million-square-foot cargo facility for “anyone who wants to lease space.” Currently the first phase is under construction, and is already 80 percent pre-leased.

With ramp work now being outsourced by airlines, it is mostly the ground-handling companies that are leasing space in these huge cargo facilities. “Twenty years ago the airlines would lease buildings, now it’s the handlers leasing space for airlines,” he said.

Additionally, Aeroterm developed a new US$35 million facility for DHL at O’Hare, with more than 423,000 square feet of warehousing. The DHL facil­ity rests on a 24-acre parcel of land, which Aeroterm controls. The location is a bonded container freight station, designated by carriers to receive cargo to be loaded into containers. It is a foreign trade zone and cold-chain-certified for pharmaceuticals, biotech and medical devices that need to be handled in a temperature-controlled environment.

American Airlines Cargo is hoping to ease its own East Coast congestion. For the second time in two years, AA Cargo has expanded at Hartsfield- Jackson Atlanta International Airport. After sharing space with other airlines, including other freighter operators, AA Cargo first added an expansion in 2013 to the area it once occupied in the shared building. Since then, the carrier has provided more room by building a 12,000-square-foot addition to the building, which is entirely dedicated to AA Cargo. The new building, managed by Swissport, is located airside to help reduce loading and unloading times for customers.

Further north, in Philadelphia, a strategically important U.S. pharma­ceutical corridor, AA has unveiled a new pharmaceutical handling center. This is American’s first fully dedi­cated pharmaceutical and healthcare handling facility and the only one of its kind in the Northeastern U.S., the airline said.

Across the carrier’s entire global network, AA Cargo has implemented cold-chain-specific infrastructure within its warehouse operations. All of the temperature-control handling at PHL moved to the new facility from an existing warehouse, which is still used for general cargo. Called Expedite TC cold storage, it is a dedicated AA Cargo facility only for the use of American’s cargo customers booking Expedite TC temperature control services.

The Philadelphia location was cho­sen not only for its close proximity to the pharmaceutical corridor, but also for easy global reach to Europe, Latin America and Asia. The airline believes this new Philadelphia facility will not only give it the space it needs, but also address the increasing demand for better temperature control within the supply chain.