FedEx ... Christmas PEAK
 

Any FedEx folks out there getting ready for peak? After the middle mgmt buyout lots of stations are "lean and mean" and it should be fun this season. Thoughts?

Where is the Black Warrior River?

MS

From Air Cargo World:

Postal Service Grounds Lucrative C-Net Contracts

The U.S. Postal Service will sharply curtail use of private air cargo airlines for annual and lucrative delivery of Christmas season mail this year, costing domestic freighter operators millions of dollars in highly-sought flight contract.

The decision, extending a dramatic revamp of the USPS's management of transport operations, effectively ends the so-called "C-Net" - for Christmas Network - system that has funneled huge volumes of greeting cards, parcels and very profitable revenue to a handful of domestic airlines.

"We are going to diminish our use of the C-Net significantly and rely instead on FedEx and greater use of ground transportation," said USPS spokesman Mark Saunders. "Customer service will not be impacted."

Other industry officials say they expect few if any private airlines to get any Christmas flights because the USPS has fine-tuned its management of trucking services and extended the limits for ground coverage from 1,700 to 3,500 miles. That allows for the entire country to be covered for all but Priority Mail and Express Mail services.

The Christmas mail network has been a dependable annual event for air carriers, keeping from 30 to 50 domestic freighters filled with mail in the weeks before Dec. 25, particularly the final two weeks of the season. Carriers such as Kitty Hawk Cargo, Evergreen International and Express One have counted important revenue from the contracts.

But those airlines are the latest to be hit by an upheaval at the USPS that has shifted huge volumes of mail away from the commercial airlines to the ground and to FedEx under a multi-year, multi-billion dollar contract. Publicly, postal air managers say they are pleased with the FedEx deal, but privately the officials almost joyful over what they say are huge gains in service and information from the FedEx service.

The Postal Service used a new lane-by-lane bidding method in air contracts awarded in June that prompted at least one airline to drop out of the network.

"We have withdrawn from the domestic mail contracts," said Jim Friedel, president of Northwest Airlines Cargo. "Under their new contracting methodology, our volumes would go down about 45 percent. At that reduced volume, the economics of the business wasn't attractive."

— Paul Page
Air Cargo World

If you take 15 B-747's worth of mail and put it on FedEx, it seems that this will be the Mother of all peak seasons for FedEx!

Ooooh, that a good rumor for the crew bus. We are getting 15 747s.

MS

God's Country.

i.e. Northern Alabama....

Huck: Is it a tributary of the Tennessee River, or near Huntsville?:suspect:

Big Bunny DC-9, could you explain your handle? MidnightSpecial is obvious for anyone who flies freight but what does your name mean? Just curious.

MS

The Black Warrior flows south into the Tombigbee, thence to historic Mobile Bay. Flows about 20 miles from my house.

In high school an insane friend of mine tried to drive a ski boat from Tuscaloosa to Mobile. He got about halfway there, hit a floating log at top speed and promptly sank.

A little trivia - the French settled first in Mobile, and they used to send their prisoners up the Black Warrior to a penal colony in Demopolis. Strange to drive through rural west Alabama and all of a sudden all the streets are French names.