Qatar Airways Cargo Winter Freighters: 100t Copenhagen Oct 25, 435t Poland, 226t JFK Nov 1

The Analysis

A freighter that starts running on a Saturday in late October is not really news. It is somebody's decision about which factory floor gets a road to the world, and those decisions are made eighteen months before the first pallet moves. Qatar Airways Cargo put a weekly 777 freighter into Copenhagen on 25 October with 100 tonnes of export capacity. On 26 October it brought Warsaw back and tagged a Warsaw to Chicago leg onto it. On 1 November it adds New York JFK. Three stations inside eight days, all landing in the week the winter schedule starts.

Here is the pile. Copenhagen weekly 777 freighter from 25 October, 100 tonnes export. Warsaw relaunched on 26 October, with a Warsaw to Chicago direct leg. New York JFK added on 1 November. Stack on the two weekly Katowice freighters and the ten weekly widebody passenger flights already running, and Polish capacity goes past 435 tonnes in each direction every week, New York passes 226 tonnes, and Dallas takes 250 tonnes inbound against 150 outbound. Behind all of it sit thirty 777 freighters and a Doha hub feeding more than 160 destinations.

I read announcements like this one as a map, not as a capacity number. Three questions, in order: which of these lanes is genuinely new road and which is old road with fresh paint, what the 435 tonnes is actually made of, and what it costs a shipper to move his cargo onto it. Because 435 tonnes you cannot book is not capacity. It is a press release.

Start by separating the new road from the repainted one. Copenhagen is new road. A weekly main deck out of Denmark with 100 tonnes of export capacity means a Danish exporter no longer has to truck his cargo south to Amsterdam or Frankfurt to find a freighter, and that matters more than the tonnage suggests, because the road leg is where most of the damage happens: another handling, another night, another party in the chain who can lose the booking. Warsaw is a relaunch rather than a launch, which tells you the lane failed once before and somebody has decided the second attempt has better odds; that history is worth a question when you sit down to sign.

The Warsaw to Chicago leg, though, is genuinely new geometry. Until now a Polish exporter sending main deck cargo to the American Midwest drove it to Frankfurt or Amsterdam first, which is roughly 550 kilometres from Warsaw to Frankfurt, eight to ten hours on the road, plus a night of ground handling, plus the risk that the truck misses the build-up cut-off and the whole thing slips a day. A direct leg deletes that whole paragraph.

Now take the 435 tonnes apart, because this is where I think everybody is going to get hurt. That number is not one product. It is a weekly freighter out of Warsaw, two weekly freighters out of Katowice, and the belly hold of ten weekly widebody passenger flights. Assume a 777 freighter at roughly 100 tonnes of payload, which is a fair working number for that airframe. One Warsaw rotation gives about 100 tonnes, two Katowice rotations give about 200, so the freighters account for something in the order of 300 tonnes a week.

That leaves roughly 135 tonnes to be found in ten passenger widebody departures, which works out at about 13.5 tonnes per passenger flight. In other words close to a third of the Polish capacity in that headline is passenger belly. Belly is not the same thing as main deck. Belly disappears when passenger loads are heavy, which is exactly what happens over the December holiday peak. Belly is cut or re-gauged when an airline changes an aircraft type on a passenger route, and no cargo customer is consulted. Belly will not take your outsize, will not take most of your dangerous goods without a fight, and gives you a loading envelope you have to design around rather than a container position you have bought.

So the number a shipper can actually contract against is not 435. It is the 300 or so that sits on freighters, and if you sign up on the strength of 435 and then discover in mid-December that a third of your allocation travelled with the suitcases and has gone, you will have learned this the expensive way.

The second thing worth reading is what they did not say, or rather the direction of what they did say. Copenhagen is quoted as 100 tonnes of export capacity and no inbound figure is offered. Dallas is quoted as 250 tonnes inbound against 150 outbound. Poland is the only one of the three quoted in both directions, and it is the only one where the freighters are dense enough to make both directions worth publishing. Capacity figures get disclosed in the direction a carrier wants to sell, and the imbalances tell you where the aircraft would otherwise go out light.

Dallas outbound is 100 tonnes a week shorter than Dallas inbound, so a Dallas-origin shipper is competing for the small side of that lane from day one and should expect both a premium and rolling. Copenhagen being quoted outbound only says the same thing from the other end: the seller wants Danish export freight and has not committed to what comes back. If you are importing into Denmark, ask the question directly rather than assuming symmetry, because there is no number in the announcement that supports the assumption.

Why this is happening now has three threads and all of them are about geography. The winter schedule starts at the end of October, which is the two moments a year when an airline is allowed to redraw its network without explaining itself, so a launch clustered on 25, 26 October and 1 November is a schedule change wearing a marketing hat. The second thread is where the factories are. Central Europe has been absorbing manufacturing that used to sit further east and further south: household appliances around Lodz and Wroclaw, automotive components through Silesia and down into Slovakia, furniture in the Poznan belt.

Katowice already had two freighter rotations a week, which is not what you do with a lane you are testing. The third thread is the hub. Thirty 777 freighters through Doha covers more than 160 destinations, so a Copenhagen or Warsaw main deck is not a point-to-point service, it is a feeder into a network that reaches most of Asia and East Africa. That is the real product being sold, and it is a different product from the one a European exporter thinks he is buying.

Rank the three stations by how much road they take out of your route, because that is the only measure that turns a new freighter into money. Warsaw to Chicago removes the most: a 550 kilometre truck leg, a night of transfer handling at a foreign gateway, and the standing risk of missing a build-up cut-off that is not yours to control, all replaced by one loading at origin. Copenhagen removes a shorter leg but a more sensitive one, because what leaves Denmark skews pharmaceutical and chilled, and on that kind of freight a transfer costs you a deviation report rather than an hour.

New York removes the least. JFK already takes freighters from half a dozen carriers plus the bellies of a large share of the passenger widebodies crossing the Atlantic, so 226 more tonnes is capacity added to a market that was not short of it. Where JFK earns its keep is behind it: the Doha connection turns a New York booking into a booking into any of the more than 160 destinations behind the hub, which only matters if your cargo was never going to stop in New York.

There is one more thing in those imbalances, and it is where the money actually is. On any lane whose two directions are different sizes, the thin direction is not priced like the thick one. Dallas outbound at 150 tonnes against 250 inbound is a ratio of 60 per cent, and in practice that means the outbound rate carries a premium and the outbound booking is the one that gets rolled when a heavy week arrives. If you ship on the thin side, your problem is not price, it is priority: ask for a stated weekly allocation on the thin direction first and let the thick direction follow, because a seller will always give you a good rate on the side he cannot fill anyway.

Read the same logic backwards and Copenhagen tells you something. They published 100 tonnes outbound and nothing inbound, which means the inbound flow is the one they have not committed their own aircraft to, which means an importer into Denmark is negotiating with somebody who has not decided and will price accordingly.

So who gains, and by how much. A Polish exporter of machinery or automotive parts into the American Midwest gains the most and gains it immediately: a direct main deck leg out of Warsaw to Chicago removes a road leg and a ground handling, and on heavy cargo the road leg is real money. A Danish exporter gains a main deck within trucking distance of Copenhagen, which for pharmaceutical and seafood shippers is worth more than the rate, because both are time-and-temperature cargo and every extra handling is either a deviation report or a claim.

A US importer routing into Dallas gains from the 250 tonnes inbound: that is the well-fed direction and it should be the easiest of the three to buy. A US exporter out of Dallas gains nothing much, because 150 tonnes outbound is the tight side. Small and mid-sized shippers without block space gain something different and temporary: a lane in its first four to six weeks is priced to fill rather than priced to yield, and that window is the cheapest capacity that lane will ever sell.

Timing, then, in the order it reaches you. The aircraft started on 25 and 26 October and the third station opens on 1 November, so the load factor on all three is unknown to the seller as well as to you, and that is the moment to ask for a block: weeks one to six are when an airline will trade price for committed volume. From the middle of November the Black Friday and Christmas replenishment traffic starts competing for the same European export space, and the lane stops being cheap. Then December arrives and the passenger side of the 435 tonnes shrinks, because passenger loads go up precisely when cargo most needs the space. After that comes January, which is when winter programmes get reviewed, and then the pre-Lunar-New-Year push out of Asia, which tightens the inbound direction into Europe while it lasts.

Here is the part I have not seen anybody write, and the reason this one earned a column rather than a forward. The market reads a number like 435 tonnes as a supply increase and behaves as if capacity has arrived. What has actually arrived is a mixed product with a large soft component, disclosed only in the direction the seller wants to sell, on lanes that are between one and eight days old at the time of reading. A shipper who treats that as firm capacity will build a Q4 plan on it and discover in December that the part he needed was belly. The question to ask any forwarder quoting you this network is not how many tonnes there are. It is how many tonnes are freighter, on which day of the week, with what cut-off, and what happens to your booking when a passenger aircraft gets substituted. Get those four answers in writing and the 435 stops being a headline and becomes a schedule.

Where it goes wrong, and how you would know. New winter freighter programmes get trimmed. The pattern is familiar: launch in late October, run through the peak, review in January, and quietly drop the stations that never filled. So the risk on a lane that is eight days old is not that the rate is wrong, it is that the lane stops. The indicator is load factor rather than price: if Warsaw or Copenhagen outbound runs below about 70 per cent for four consecutive weeks, expect either a frequency cut or a smaller aircraft, and expect your annual block space agreement to be honoured exactly as far as the airline finds convenient.

The reverse is equally useful. If the lane goes out full for six weeks, the promotional pricing disappears somewhere in week six to eight and the rate steps up by 15 to 25 per cent. Both cases argue for the same structure: a three-month block with a written review point, rather than a twelve-month commitment on a lane that is younger than your last invoice.

Now the ledger, with the assumptions written out. Assume you are shipping appliance and automotive spare parts out of Lodz to Chicago. Assume a consignment of 2,800 kg gross and 3,200 kg volumetric, so chargeable weight is 3,200 kg. Assume that on the old routing you truck to Frankfurt at an assumed EUR 0.35 per chargeable kilo for road plus origin and transfer handling, which is EUR 1,120, and then fly Frankfurt to Chicago at an assumed USD 3.10 per kilo, which is USD 9,920.

Assume the new Warsaw direct leg removes the road leg and one ground handling entirely and is offered at the same USD 3.10: the flight is still USD 9,920 and the EUR 1,120 simply disappears. Assume further that in the launch window the airline discounts 12 per cent to fill the aircraft, giving USD 8,730, so the saving is EUR 1,120 plus USD 1,190. At an assumed USD 1.08 to the euro that is about USD 2,400 on one consignment.

Run one consignment a week and that is roughly USD 9,600 a month for doing nothing but loading in a different place. The cost side of that decision is small but real: you lose the flexibility of Frankfurt, where a missed booking can be re-flown on the next of a dozen departures, and you gain a weekly departure where a missed cut-off costs you seven days. Price that exposure before you take the discount.

The Copenhagen case is a different shape, and it is worth doing separately. Assume you are exporting pharmaceutical product from Denmark and today you truck to Amsterdam to reach a main deck. Assume 1,500 kg chargeable, an assumed road and handling cost of EUR 0.40 per kilo, so EUR 600, and an assumed eight to twelve hours of additional transit plus one extra temperature-controlled transfer. A local freighter removes the road leg and the transfer. For GDP-controlled cargo the transfer is the expensive part rather than the euro figure: every additional handling is another place the temperature record can break and another document somebody has to defend.

Assume the airline's direct routing via Doha adds six to ten hours of flight time compared with a European gateway connection, which it usually does, and you are trading six to ten hours in the air for a road leg and a handling on the ground. That trade is worth taking for temperature-controlled and high-value cargo and worth refusing for anything where the road leg is cheap and the goods are robust.

If you are considering switching a European gateway entirely onto one of these lanes, count what you give up. A Frankfurt or Amsterdam departure gives you re-accommodation within hours when something rolls; a weekly freighter gives you a seven-day wait. A gateway gives you a choice of carriers on the same day; a new station gives you one. The two things worth insisting on before you move: a written re-accommodation commitment naming the alternative routing if the freighter does not operate, and a cut-off time in writing rather than a verbal assurance.

Nadia would cut this along the clock from cut-off to pick-up to linehaul to clearance to delivery and ask the one question I keep forgetting to ask: a new freighter does not move your cut-off later, it usually moves it earlier, because the build-up and screening window did not get any shorter just because the departure is new. Plan the truck to arrive earlier on the new lane, not at the same time you arrived for the old one.

Two more practical traps. Anything you move through Doha touches the ground there, and for pharmaceutical cargo that means the transit handling and the tarmac exposure at a hot hub sit inside your temperature record; ask for the transit handling procedure before you book, not after the first deviation. Anything outsize or dangerous has to be cleared against the freighter rather than the network, because the belly part of that 435 tonnes will not carry it and the freighter may not have the loading position on the day you want. Both of those are cheap to check in week two and expensive to discover in week ten.

The way I would play it, in one line: take the launch window price on the lane that actually removes a road leg for you, contract only the freighter tonnes, put a re-accommodation clause and a review point in writing, and keep your gateway fallback alive for the December weeks when the passenger bellies fill with suitcases. New road is worth using. It is just worth reading the small print before you move the plant onto it.

↑ Back to the key points

— By Ömer Kaya