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title : Cargo's Virus Protections |
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Cargo's Virus Protections
Is air cargo the airlines' best defense against SARS? With the virus wreaking economic havoc across Asia last month and ominously spreading into Taiwan, a couple of the region's battered carriers restored a few services and said stable demand for bellyhold freight space was a key reason for some of the flight resumptions. "At the moment, cargo is keeping a lot of our flights (afloat)," Tony Tyler of Cathay Pacific Airways told the Dow Jones news service.
With passenger demand down sharply in Hong Kong, China, Singapore and other sites, carriers that serve the region have pulled down huge swaths of seating capacity. Cathay's weekly capacity last month was down 45 percent, including reductions to Europe. Singapore Airlines had cut 31.5 percent of its passenger capacity for the second quarter, including the dropping of 358 weekly flights, most of them in Asia. Analysts estimate intra-Asia passenger schedules had been cut up to 50 percent but longhaul services were also being hit. Air Canada was reportedly preparing to ground the six 747s it flies over the Pacific as its passenger business in the region had been cut in half.
Cathay Chief Executive David Turnbull issued a bleak assessment to airline workers: "Our financial situation is bad. And although we will not run out of money today or tomorrow, that day is coming and our fortunes will not change soon."
Airlines and forwarders insist the virus called severe acute respirator syndrome is not a cargo story, saying freighter capacity has picked up any slack in capacity and that the region's economic outfit appears unaffected. "There have been challenges, to be sure, but there have also been both conventional and unconventional opportunities to address these problems," said Expeditors International Chairman Peter Rose. "In general, market space has been sufficient."
Still, forwarders say rates were on the rise last month as shipments searched for freighters rather than more economical belly space.
And the movement of SARS into Taiwan raised new fears that the health scare would spill into the trade world because of the huge electronic shipping out of Taipei. At the recent Cargo Network Services meeting in Miami, several forwarders said high-tech shippers had asked them to detail what measures they could take to ensure that the SARS virus is not transmitted in cargo shipments.
The capacity reductions may have been behind a cargo slowdown at Hong Kong International Airport. The handler Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Ltd. reported import traffic, which is largely intra-Asia trade, fell 0.9 percent in April
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