Alternate airports can ease cargo congestion, but pose challenges for 3PLs

NEW ORLEANS — While some cargo charters and freight forwarders are turning to alternate, cargo-focused airports to avoid congestion at major U.S. gateways, the robust flight schedules at hubs like Los Angeles (LAX) and Chicago O’Hare (ORD) are difficult to replicate at other airports, leading many 3PLs to put up with increasing congestion rather than make a change. [caption id="attachment_64519" align="alignright" width="450"] Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) Photo credit: Glenn Beltz, flicker[/caption] The benefits of operating from less busy hubs are clear and have been well-demonstrated by express providers, which have frequently established regional hubs as alternatives to the region’s busiest airport, said panelist Michael Webber, president at Texas-based consultancy Webber Air Cargo, during a discussion on airport congestion at last week’s AirCargo 2022 conference in New Orleans. “There’s a reason why UPS put a Midwest hub in Rockford [RFD] rather than O’Hare and Ontario [ONT] instead of LAX,” Webber said. “On the other hand, what you haven’t seen is a great deal of that kind of movement for the international traffic.” Historically, Webber noted, even payment schemes targeted at relocating cargo traffic to less busy, nearby airports have often failed because “there are so many benefits to incumbency from the freight forwarder world.” “I know any number of airports would love to get a flight to China two days a week,” Webber said. “The problem is, what if one of those flights gets a mechanical and your next flight is in two or three days? Now if that same cargo is sitting at O’Hare, your next flight to Shanghai [PVG] might be in four hours. So all of these things work against the alternative gateways.” With cargo traffic forecast to continue growing and unlikely to move completely away from congested gateways, panelists focused on the importance of investing in technology improvements and expanding the labor force at airports. In some cases, those two pieces go hand in hand. For example, while there are concerns about shortages of truck drivers, truck operations at airports can be streamlined significantly with technology improvements. “The systems aren’t keeping up,” said Chad Hawley, owner of cartage company Victory Final Mile, which operates in the Pacific Northwest. “We’ve got a lot of issues where the driver will get there, it says [the cargo has] arrived, but nobody can find it. And so my driver sits and waits and then it’s, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t know where it is,’ and then the call goes to the forwarder and the forwarder says, ‘Well, it’s there.’” Throughout the back and forth, “the driver sits there, and hourly drivers don’t mind as much, but the guys who get paid by the run, those are the guys who really start getting upset.” Instituting training programs to grow the workforce are a viable approach to addressing labor issues, but technology improvements are frequently a “low-hanging fruit,” said Jared Azcuy, CEO of handler Alliance Ground International, during the panel. “We were able to do that and improve communication to the forwarding community, to the consignees and the carrier.” “We’re still trying new things,” Azcuy said. “Our customer service centers are off-site and can better communicate with the forwarder so that they don’t have a truck driver that misses pickup.”

Alternate airports can ease cargo congestion, but pose challenges for 3PLs

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