Cargo hub in St. Louis progresses
St. Louis Post Dispatch
January 20, 2011
The region's bid to become an international cargo hub cleared a pivotal hurdle yesterday as Chinese authorities designated an airline to negotiate with Lambert-St. Louis International Airport.
At a meeting in Beijing, Chinese aviation authorities instructed the freight arm of China Eastern to seek a final deal -- long in the making -- for regularly scheduled cargo service here. The announcement gives the clearest signal yet that Chinese-flagged cargo jets might soon start touching down at Lambert.
Business and civic leaders believe talks will progress quickly from here. A team from China Eastern plans to come to Lambert in mid-February. And the Civil Aviation Administration of China set a goal of starting Boeing 747 flights between Lambert and Shanghai's Pudong International Airport in the first half of 2011, according to a briefing on the meeting received by Mike Jones, chairman of the Midwest China Hub Commission.
"This has been a long process," he said. "We anticipate it will be relatively short negotiations."
The broader success of the hub will likely depend largely on a group of essential but low-profile companies in the shipping industry: freight forwarders.
Often described as "travel agents for cargo," freight forwarders book space on planes for companies needing to ship materials. More than manufacturers or airlines, they decide what products move where and how things get from Point A to Point B.
Right now, they mostly move international freight through a handful of gateway airports -- such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami -- that have sophisticated ground facilities and lots of flight options. Convincing them to come to a new market such as St. Louis could be a challenge, said David Harris, editor of Cargo Facts, a freight industry trade publication. "Airlines don't really pick destinations in freight. They fly where their customers want them to go, and their customers are mostly freight forwarders," he said. " 'Build it, and they will come' has been the downfall of endless cargo projects."
If China is going to establish an airline hub in the Midwest, our guess is it will be at one airport, not two an hour apart.
If you had to pick one, which would you choose? The established airport in a city with an internationally recognizable name, or an airport with no planes in Mascoutah?
Do we have any competitive advantage over Lambert? It sure doesn't seem like it.
Lambert even has a powerful group in its corner called the Midwest China Hub Commission. That M really stands for pro-Missouri business organizations and political leaders. In St. Clair County, Kern more often than not seems to be working alone.
Maybe St. Clair County would be willing to give away more tax incentives than St. Louis, but that wouldn't solve the problem of how to stop the airport from being a financial drain on the county's budget.
How many carp would MidAmerica have to ship to even break even?
Kern needs to be figuring out a plan for this airport that fixes the equation
