- After just five months of operation, European cargo carrier Cargolux Airlines International has shipped its first 10,000 tonnes of cargo between its headquarters in Luxembourg and its new hub in Zhengzhou, China. The carrier also announced that a fifth weekly flight between the two hubs will begin on Nov.25. The flight carrying the 10,000th tonne – using a 747-8 freighter named “City of Zhengzhou” for this occasion – left on Nov. 22, after a ceremony attended by François Bausch, Luxembourg’s Minister of Sustainable Development and Infrastructure, Cargolux Chairman Paul Helminger and Cargolux President and CEO Dirk Reich. The service to Zhengzhou, in China’s Henan Province, began in June.
- Deutsche Post DHL has completed the first construction phase of its €150 million Leipzig European Hub project with the opening of an expansion to its current warehouse facility. The new warehouse can now process 50 percent more freight, with a capacity of more than 15,000 shipments per hour. The next phase of the project will be the construction of a new 40,000-square-meter warehouse, which will double the facility’s current footprint. Leipzig Halle is Germany’s second largest airport by cargo volume.
- Johannesburg-based carrier BidAir Cargo, which manages daytime cargo operations on domestic passenger services across South and East Africa, has acquired the express business of Imperial Air Cargo (IAC). IAC’s network provides overnight delivery service between the South African cities of Johannesburg, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Durban, using a fleet of three leased 737-200 freighters. These flights are integrated with a road feeder services that connect to cities such as Bloemfontein, George and East London.
- Charter broker Air Partner has joined forces with Envirotainer to provide air logistics and secure cool-chain equipment in response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa. The two companies have organized regular charter flights to U.K.-funded treatment centers in Freetown, Sierra Leone, using Envirotainer’s RAP e2 containers that are designed to carry temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals and other emergency medical supplies.
- Steam Logistics, based in Chattanooga, Tenn., opened a new office in Atlanta after seeing a 400 percent growth in demand for its freight-forwarding and customs brokerage services so far in 2014. Located on the south side of Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, the new office will work mostly with international clients.
- Houston-based supply-chain management firm CEVA Logistics reached a 20.4 percent penetration rate for the use of electronic air waybills (e-AWB) across its global business. CEVA began the process to switch to 100 percent paperless documentation in the summer of 2013, when it signed onto IATA’s e-AWB multilateral agreement. After successful pilot operations were conducted in New York, Atlanta, London and Frankfurt, CEVA is now rolling out e-AWB globally for those carriers that support it.
- Damco, the aircargo forwarding and logistics arm of oceanfreight giant Maersk, has opened an office in Zhengzhou, China. The move was made to more easily handle multimodal shipment of electronic goods to ocean ports as more high-tech factories move from coastal China to less expensive inland areas. Last year, 40 percent of Damco’s airfreight volume in Central China was shipped from Zhengzhou.
- Freight carrier Cargolux presented its 2014 Dangerous Goods Awareness Award to Hanoi-based ground handling company Air Cargo Services Center (ACS) in recognition of the efforts by ACS to handle dangerous goods carefully and correctly this year in Vietnam.
- MRO provider Lufthansa Technik recently erected an inflatable hangar at Budapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport to protect its engineers from the bitter Eastern European winter weather. The new hangar – which provides floor space of up to 4,000 square meters and can withstand 70 to 80 km/hour wond gusts – can accommodate an entire A320 or 737 aircraft. The facility is now providing extra space for Lufthansa Technik Budapest’s existing hangar, which can house up to five mid-size aircraft at once.
- Japan’s Nippon Cargo Airlines (NCA) has launched a new service to provide transport of live animals out of Frankfurt-Hahn Airport. This month, a collection of pythons, colubrid snakes and beaded lizards became the first “air passengers” carried by NCA, from Frankfurt to Tokyo, on a specially heated and ventilated aircraft. Ground handlers VG Cargo GmbH helped wrangle the live cargo for the safe trip.
- Hong Kong-based logistics firm Frontier Services Group Ltd. (FSG) has established Phoenix Aviation Malta Ltd. (PAM) on the Mediterranean island of Malta, offering specialty passenger and cargo flight services to its customers across North Africa. FSG also said it will reposition two of its aircraft to Malta by the end of this month in response to increased demand.