Air freight from Mexico.....

[Bigt]

There I was in Tescos doing the weekly shop.....when I was drawn to the label on spring onions.....product of Mexico by air.

So how would this have travelled to UK....dedicated cargo operator or pax. operator

Just one of those unanswered questions of life:rolleyes:

[CargoMatatu]

It could have been either.

Freight forwarders us all capacity available for fresh produce, flying both full charters on freighters and available belly space on pax flights.

[Need to Know Basis]

Think of all those bucket & space flights comming back from Cancun or where ever in sunny Mexico. Lots of belly space.

I thought Mexicana had started flights into LGW as well ?

[AircraftOperations]

Don't know how much space/weight those bucket and spade charters would have for cargo when you consider full flights and possibly lots of baggage on 767/A330 types. Even with favourable winds, it is quite a lot of flying.
Don't Cargolux, Lufthansa and a few others run freighters from MEX to Europe.

Mexico is like Brazil in that there is a lot of produce and engineered cargo needing to get over to Europe and sometimes there is a backlog of available space.

[vipero]

Many cargo flights from US area arrives in Glasgow Prestwick, if I'm not wrong.
It could happen some of them are prosecutions from MEX...

[G&T ice n slice]

A quick estimate for 2008

Direct Mexico - Europe approx 35,000 tonnes
7 direct scheduled carriers
approx 20,000 tonnes on freighters
approx 15,000 tonnes on pax operations

I started doing estimates on indirect ((via Miami, Houston, Dallas))
and 'non-scheds' but it's too late at night

What a dull life I must lead to spend my evenings doing free research !

[L-38]

North American spring onions flown to Europe? In California here, we have freshly picked yellow Bell Peppers labeled "Produce of the Netherlands". . . . Go figure.

[G&T ice n slice]

Ah yes, peppers & "on the vine" tomato

grown in greenhouse hydroponically, heated with "endless, cheap" North Sea gas.

Some years ago I had a working day trip in the Netherlands. Flew out of RTM in an F-28. Had an intersting noise-abatement departure which seemed to involve a fairly tight circular climb, thus I got a panoramic 360 view of the area, which seemed to be very brightly lit. I asked the chap in the seat beside me about this. "Kaboom" I've found his pet hate - commercial greenhouses. All brighly lit all night with special "sun-like-spectrum" floodlights, burning N.S. gas for heating, which gas, apparently now had to be imported from Germany & subsidised to keep to the original pricing agreement when NS gas was 'endless', and how there was so much NS gas the Dutch sold guaranteed volumes for years & years ahead to the Germans and now the gas was running out but we still have to send the guaranteed volumes to the Germans and have to import it back again, and how the wages in the greenhouses picking the tomatos etc were so low we had to import loads of Moroccans to do the work, and....
etc etc for about 40 minutes (right to touchdown at LHR).

But yes, sometimes one suspects that the world has gone mad

[sunnybunny]

On a flight in to Oslo with BA I noted that alongside the cases being unloaded were cartons of fresh tomatoes from the canaries.

[Sleeping Freight Dog]

North American spring onions flown to Europe? In California here, we have freshly picked yellow Bell Peppers labeled "Produce of the Netherlands". . . . Go figure.

Hence the KL Combi that operates daily at LAX. If watch it unload, just about
every day you will see pallets of bell peppers, capsicum etc. Very aromatic when you open up that cargo door.