Cargo Chat: Amerijet’s Strauss on scaling up operations in a bustling market

Dedicated freighter capacity has surfaced as a prized commodity during the COVID-19 pandemic, and with passenger travel slow to rebound and return to the skies lower-hold capacity , opportunities aboun d for carriers with freighter fleets. [caption id="attachment_86417" align="alignright" width="286"] Tim Strauss became CEO of Amerijet last August. Photo courtesy of Amerijet.[/caption] Miami-based Amerijet International had started growing its fleet and branching out from scheduled cargo operations when the pandemic hit and catalyzed those opportunities . In the current market environment, “ t he opportunities come faster than your ability to respond to them ,” according to CEO Tim Strauss . Strauss assumed the role in August 2020 after recent leadership roles within the cargo divisions of Hawaiian Air and Air Canada, and recently joined Air Cargo World for a discussion on Amerijet’s growth mindset in a market that demands accelerated capacity expansion . ACW: How did you approach the transition from day one, especially being in the middle of a pandemic? How do you get the team motivated and start to set priorities? TS : C oming into a new position , you bring your own energy , a nd you listen — it’s a different kind of listening . You try to gather information and build some different models in your mind , and on paper . [Amerijet] has been in the public for 44 years and had focused strictly on flying a scheduled system in the Latin America and Caribbean area. It was only about 11 months ago that Amerijet flew its first flight across the Atlantic into Brussels , a nd so started for the first time to capture Europe . The company wants to grow, the people want to experience more than what they had internally only. T here’s a mix of employees here, and most are hardcore, long - time , very skilled Amerijet employees, but hadn’t experienced other markets and other ways of doing business and just other ideas. So, a whole lot of dialogue in my management style is pretty much a no - fault style. I don’t care what the past was, it’s just , ‘ how are we going to get to the future ? ’ I think if you came into this environment with kind of a top - down, heavy - handed management style, you would just close everybody off. So some of it is building that sense of trust and getting people to open up and have some pretty good discussions. And I think we’ve done a reasonable job of that. If you can find airplanes and crew and everything else in the right sequence, and I think that’s some of the challenge — i n an aircraft world, you plan nine to 12 months out to bring a new airplane on and here, [customers are saying to us, ‘ we want to bring two or three airplanes over to your system, and we’d like to do in 90 days. ’ Well, that’s hard. I mean, just mathematically, structurally, all the FAA documentation and handoffs are difficult, getting crew at the proper capacity . I t’s not hard to get crew right now — it’s hard to bring them on in a timely manner as fast as demand has grown. ACW : What are you doing to bring on crew in a timely manner? TS : We had been represented in a pilot group by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), but the pilots in October voted out the IBT, and in A LPA [the Air Line Pilots Association] , so I’ve had a great chance to build some very good relationships with that group of folks. It’s also different as an airline that was mostly flying from Miami into the Caribbean, or Latin America, but almost always out and back and in your own bed every night . Well, all of a sudden, we’re flying long-haul work for DHL in different parts of the country or the world. And, you know, crews aren’t always at home at night s o some of our systems weren’t built for that. ACW: Is this relatively new type of flying for Amerijet, including the trans-Atlantic and other flights outside of Latin America , reflective of the pandemic, or the future growth trajectory that the airline is on? TS : I think it’s a combination of both. P rior to my arrival, Vic Karjian — the former CEO and now the executive chairman — had us on a pattern for the last four years of developing relationships with the integrator world, and some of those elements to get us into ACMI and CMI flying at a higher level than we had been doing. We're doing modest amounts of that and are positioning ourselves for the future to do more of that. COVID has put all of that on steroids and so the opportunities are there to do some more things at a faster pace than we anticipated. But we were certainly preparing ourselves for this being the future of the airline. We were in the middle of that when I arrived but knew what we wanted to do in terms of crew scheduling platforms, the core cargo management system that we have and the accounting system we have. We ’ re replacing all of those, and those are major platforms for growth. They ’ re catalysts to help you grow and to let you grow at pace. You can do a lot of things on a five-to-six- airplane system via paper that you can’t do with the 12- to- 15-airplane system. Just the record-keeping on the aircraft side is significantly more difficult. ACW: Could you speak to some of these CMI and other opportunities driven by e-commerce? TS: We know there ’ s a 30% or 40% [growth] , or whatever the number is, in the e - commerce world, that leads to airlines needing more supply that they can’t get as fast as they want to and so that obviously leads to some opportunity for us. It ’ s all performance based, they [e-commerce and express companies) are never going to give you their airplane unless you can keep it at the right performance level. We think there ’ s quite a bit more opportunity out there.

Cargo Chat: Amerijet’s Strauss on scaling up operations in a bustling market

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