Atlas Air begins operating 747F for Flexport amid forwarder’s legal spat with Western Global

When the partnership between Western Global and Flexport was announced last year, the deal was originally supposed to last three years. Although there are a couple of sound arguments for switching to the production variant of the 747-400F – including up to ten additional tonnes of payload, and nose-loading capabilities – Flexport also said multiple “service failures” ultimately led to the switch.  

As Air Cargo World reported, earlier this month Flexport filed a complaint against Western Global Airlines (WGA) in a U.S. District Court in New York, alleging that On Time Performance Reports submitted by Western Global indicated the carrier did not meet its contractually mandated 80% schedule reliability rate in March and April, which formed the basis for terminating the contract. For its part, Western Global disputed that it failed to meet its contracted schedule reliability threshold, telling Cargo Facts, “not a single delay was actually a carrier controllable delay and WGA’s performance was in fact 100% during the period raised by Flexport.” For more on the spat, see Air Cargo World’s story here.  

As for Atlas, cooperation with Flexport is not new. In fact, when Flexport first dabbled in trans-Pacific freighter charters in November 2017, it chartered a 747-400F from Atlas. Moving forward, the Atlas-operated 747-400F will operate a schedule similar to that of WGA’s 747-400BCF, flying from HKG to LAX twice a week and from HKG to ORD once a week.