"The other side of the airport"

Monday, July 31, 2000

The other side of the airport
Rarely seen by passengers, the air cargo industry provides plenty of work at
JIA
By Mark Gordon
The Florida Times-Union


Just about every day around 7 a.m., the piercing smell of burned rubber from
worn airplane tires fills the sky surrounding Jacksonville International
Airport.

On a surprisingly chilly morning earlier this month, though, Craig Barkley,
a supervisor for an air cargo company at JIA, is oblivious to the stench. He
leans back in a partially ripped, crusty yellow swivel chair and chuckles at
a joke cracked by a co-worker.

A few seconds later someone in the small group yells out, "It's here," and
Barkley pops out of his chair. He grabs a pair of keys and some wands --
bright orange sticks -- to control the direction of the plane.

It's not yet 7:30 on a Friday morning, and Barkley's crew has already
unloaded a pair of cargo planes. The work is methodical, scientific and
precise.

Barkley's crew makes up part of a relatively unknown business at the
airport. Even though the air cargo side is tucked away on the southeast end
of the airport, rarely seen by passengers, it is a key cog that fuels the
airport's economy.

"It's a whole different world than the passenger side of the house," said
Tommy Jones, the airport's marketing manager and resident air cargo expert.
"A lot of people, when they see the last [passenger] plane leave, they think
we're done for the day.

"But we're not. We're a 24-hour operation."

Although the statistics have taken a slight dive over the past few months,
mostly due to competition from carriers in Orlando and Miami, the air cargo
business for JIA has grown 42 percent since 1995, a pace quicker than the
passenger side -- and JIA is the fastest-growing airport in the state for
passenger traffic.

The airport handled 147.7 million pounds of cargo in 1999, the sixth
consecutive year it broke its own record. Airport officials expect that to
continue when the 2000 numbers are counted, predicting a total of about 150
million pounds.

Including passenger airlines, there are roughly 40 Jacksonville-based
businesses that have some connection to air cargo, the biggest of which is
FedEx. All the business combined takes about 215,000 square feet of
warehouse space at the airport, but that doesn't count the grounds that
surround the hangars.

The air cargo unit pumps $240 million into Jacksonville's economy each year,
according to the most recent economic impact study commissioned by the
Jacksonville Port Authority, which runs the airport.

Cargo competition

Despite the growth, one of the planes Barkley worked on -- an Emery
Worldwide 757 jet flown and operated by Capital Air Cargo -- represents part
of a problem for the airport. Emery is an integral player in the local air
cargo market, but it recently cut some of its nightly shipments, deciding
instead to truck packages from the Northeast Florida region to Orlando and
fly them out of an airport there.

Other shippers have chosen to take this route as well lately; Jacksonville
has lost 1.2 million pounds of cargo a week this way to airports in Orlando,
Miami and Atlanta. Jones calls it spillage.

"That's significant," Jones said. "That's a lot of cargo a week that goes
down that road. If we had that being carried out of here by [our] companies,
that would be a lot better."

He said a big reason companies choose to leave the airport and head for a
place like Miami is the fierce competition in other cities that brings down
costs. Jones said the airports in South Florida have been flooded with air
cargo companies that cater to South American and Central American companies,
destinations that have been Jacksonville strengths.

But on this particular morning in mid-July, Barkley isn't concerned about
competing air cargo companies. Barkley is the station manager for Miami
Aircraft, a Miami-based operation that runs an office out of JIA and
airports across the country.

The company acts essentially as a middleman in the air cargo universe; it
waits for planes to land at an airport -- in Jacksonville's case, planes
from United Parcel Service and Emery Worldwide -- and then its crews unload
the jets and, if necessary, refill them with outbound packages.

Barkley and his crew epitomize Jacksonville's air cargo industry. Take, for
example, a UPS flight that flew in from Philadelphia a few weeks ago.

A portion of the plane -- the equivalent of about five rows of seats in a
passenger plane -- acts as a cargo door and opens outward. A few employees
from Barkley's crew, dressed in green Miami Aircraft T-shirts with bright
orange vests. climb inside the belly of the jet.

They emerge with a large box that looked like a camping tent. Inside are
hundreds of UPS packages, parcels ranging from clothes to letters. Behind
those crates are seven or eight more.

The boxes, which Barkley calls "condos on wheels," are loaded onto an
elevator and dropped onto a conveyor belt just off the runway. They then are
taken to the UPS facility at the airport, about 50 feet away.

Once inside the facility, the packages are greeted by UPS truck drivers. The
drivers put the packages on another conveyor belt, and sort them as they
float down the line.

With the sun still not up, the UPS truckers climb into their brown rigs and
drive off. Barkley and his crew go back to the Miami Aircraft garage,
adjacent to the UPS building, and wait for the next plane to land.

Such an unloading is about average for Miami Aircraft. It gets busier at
certain times of the year -- the amount of cargo usually triples in the two
weeks before Christmas -- but mostly they unload about 100,000 pounds a day.

Fixing Air Force One

While UPS and Emery Worldwide might carry name recognition with the general
public, there are some lesser-known companies carving a niche for themselves
in the Jacksonville air cargo industry. One of those is Pilot Air Freight, a
suburban Philadelphia-based operation that has an independently run
franchise at the airport.

Matthew Loux, the owner of the Pilot Air division at JIA, said what
separates his company from the big cargo fliers and other freight forwarders
is the personal commitment to the customer. Other companies ship on a set
schedule -- if the plane is supposed to leave at 7:30 a.m., it usually does.

But Pilot contracts out shipments, using whatever methods it can to meet the
delivery needs.

"You can't do that with FedEx," Loux said recently while sitting behind his
desk in a cramped office at the airport. "With us, we can offer same-day
service."

And Loux has come through that promise.

A few months ago, Loux was in his office when he got a phone call from a
Navy official at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station: President Clinton's
plane, Air Force One, was grounded in San Diego with a maintenance problem
and needed a special part that was thought only to be available from
Jacksonville. The Navy was calling on Loux to get the part to San Diego,
fast.

A Pilot Air employee picked up the part and hopped on the next plane for the
West Coast.

"Unfortunately, by the time it got there, [the Air Force One crew] had
already found the part on another passenger plane," Loux said. "So our part
went to replace that one."

Under Loux's leadership, Pilot has made other quick trips. In January,
General Electric called around 6 p.m. one day and said it needed about 2,000
pounds of consumer products to be sent to the grand opening of a Home Depot
in North Carolina by 8 a.m. the next day.

The only catch was that a snowstorm was blanketing the East Coast, forcing
several airports to shut down. Loux got a team of truck drivers together,
and they hit the road.

The packages made it Davidson, N.C., arriving 20 minutes before the store
opened.

Loux said work like that is behind the company's skyrocketing growth. Since
he opened the office a little more than two years ago, the employee base has
jumped from two to 12. It had $2.1 million in sales last year and expects to
bring in between $3.5 and $4 million this year.

These numbers come after 1998, the company's first full year in business,
when it posted sales of $200,000. The business has gone from being at the
bottom of Pilot's 60 franchises to right in the middle.

"Basically, everyone in this office has a can-do attitude," Loux said. "We
don't turn anyone away."


Five things you (probably) never knew about air cargo business at
Jacksonville International Airport:

Seven of the passenger airlines that serve Jacksonville International
Airport run independent cargo businesses that compete with the other fliers
at the airport.

Virtually every passenger plane that leaves the airport, from the widebody
jets heading to Atlanta to the tiny prop planes bound for Tallahassee, also
carries some amount of U.S. mail. The shipments are mostly letters, and the
airlines all have contracts with the U.S. Postal Service.

Cargo regularly handled at the airport varies from fruits and vegetables to
cigars and leather luggage.

During hurricanes last year, about 60,000 pounds of generators and electric
equipment were shipped to San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Air cargo planes can land and take off 24 hours a day at the airport, but
the most popular window for coming and going is between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m.,
Monday through Friday.

   Post your opinion on this story in the CAA Discussion Forum
http://www.californiaaviation.org/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard.cgi?conf=DCConfID8

*****************************************