Fruitful connections: How avocados can shape airport strategy

Passing through Big D

China’s insatiable demand for perishables, from Mexican avocados to Chilean blueberries, has been a boon for airfreight demand across the Pacific – but for many commodities moving between distant city pairs without direct flights, there is no single, clear-cut path. Did Avocado Lady’s bumpy-skinned fruit start their journey on a flight from Mexico City or Guadalajara? Or were they trucked to Dallas before being loaded into the belly of an American Airlines 787? While only the forwarder knows for sure, DFW Airport’s executive vice president for global strategy and development, John Ackerman, told Air Cargo World that his cargo division is doing everything in its power to ensure DFW is an attractive option for forwarders.

In the past, DFW, like most airports, sought to increase its cargo handle with attempts to lure new flights and add cargo capacity. But between 2007 and 2014, even as new flights were added, airfreight tonnage gradually declined at an annual rate of 0.8 percent. As the story of avocados illustrates, demand must be allocated to capacity, and these allocation decisions are not made by airports or airlines, but by forwarders and supply-chain managers. Within the supply chain, “DFW realized that future airfreight growth would depend on defining opportunities in the same way as these business partners,” Ackerman said.

The realization that such decisions were driven by more than just aircraft landing fees led DFW to narrow its focus to particular commodities traveling along specific trade lanes, and to consider total landed cost advantages. According to Ackerman, “this new focus on total landed cost allows us to speak to forwarders and supply chain managers using the language and metrics that they do, and also sharpens our focus on those markets where our airport has a total landed cost advantage compared with competitor cargo gateway airports in the United States.”

DFW is currently the largest second-tier airport in the United States, ranking number five behind Miami, New York-JFK, LAX and Chicago O’Hare, with a handle of just under 670,000 tonnes in 2015. Elevation to tier-one status will require DFW to capture a larger chunk of the airfreight tonnage carried annually between Asia and Latin America via the United States – which coincidentally totals 670,000 tonnes as well – plus a larger share of Texan exports.

Given the special handling requirements of perishables moving between Latin America and Asia, goods typically travel via an air-truck-air, or truck-air route combination through gateways well-equipped with cold-chain infrastructure. Until March 2016, when American Airlines opened a 4,000-square-foot drive-through perishable facility, DFW lacked such infrastructure meaning that shipments of perishables often bypassed DFW for other gateways.