Are you deliberately misinterpreting what Ex Cargo Clown wrote?
He didn’t say cargo was a massive loss maker and drain on resources, he said there’s not a huge amount of money to be made.
In that respect you also have to consider volumes. STN and EMA both have huge amounts of freight-only traffic from the big operators; DHL, FedEx and UPS. Plus main deck capacity from the likes of Asiana, Cargolux and Qatar etc. Both airports together handed 5 times the amount as Manchester in 2019, and have the volume of freight traffic and spare capacity to make it worthwhile and profitable. The majority of Manchester’s fright traffic has been belly capacity on passenger flights in recent years... modern aircraft such as the A330/350 and B777/787 have so much belly capacity for cargo that the need for dedicated freighter service is much reduced in all but the largest markets.
To put it in perspective, here are the CAA stats for freight traffic for 2019. I’m only reproducing airports handling over 15 000T of freight, figure underneath each tonnage is percentage change vs previous year.
London Heathrow
1 587 486T
-7%
East Midlands
335 948T
+/-0%
London Stansted
224 139T
-1%
London Gatwick
110 358T
-2%
Manchester
108 382T
-5%
London Luton
35 761T
+37%
Birmingham
29 866T
-11%
Belfast International
25 095T
-9%
Edinburgh
19 410T
-5%
Doncaster
17 647T
+148%
So take away points from the above data are as follows;
- Freight volumes at STN and EMA are huge in comparison to MAN. And most of theirs is dedicated freight service rather than passenger belly capacity. They have the economies of scale to handle these flights.
- Freight across the board was generally declining in volume. A lot of airlines have been in the process of ending their dedicated freighter operations because of depressed yields resulting from increased belly capacity.
- Doncaster are clearly going after this market as they have a large and very quiet airfield, with TUI and Wizz Air being the only significant operators
- Manchester have been more keen on passenger capacity, and the huge freight potential in the holds of those flights
- In the biggest recession aviation has ever seen, no company is going to invest huge sums in equipment and staff training to handle the odd one-off ad hoc freighter flight. It would be the handling agent that would bear that cost. The airport wouldn’t get much other than the landing fee. What would be in it for either Swissport/Menzies Cargo or the Airport? Everyone in aviation is trying to minimise cash burn at the moment. Any spending must be justified for return on investment.
- It’s irrational to expect that Manchester and its handling agents should attempt to handle dedicated freighters at all costs.
- It’s irrational to assume that all such capacity is desperate to use Manchester, and would only utilise Doncaster or East Midlands (or any other UK airport) because Manchester didn’t want the business.
The truth is Manchester didn’t have the space to handle dedicated freighters on any scale pre-COVID, nor the demand. Now things have changed, it’s not worth the handling agents throwing huge investment at a sector to gain a bit of incremental revenue. If Etihad wanted to operate a daily 777F to Manchester for the next 3 years and were willing to place a contract with a handling agent accordingly I’m sure you’d see a different answer.