The fortunes of the air cargo business and the entire aviation sector have experienced a severe decline because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent data from the International Air Transport Association (IATA) revealed that global volumes fell by 6.6% in November 2020 compared to November 2019, with international cargo falling by 7.7% despite minor signs of recovery.
While the virus's disruptive impact on the aviation industry will likely continue into 2021 and beyond, here are some current air cargo trends to watch for to see how the industry is dealing with its effects:
Response to the Pandemic
Passenger numbers before the pandemic were already shrinking. However, it became much worse as the COVID-19 crisis progressed. The need to transport pandemic payloads saw the deployment of hundreds of passenger planes as freighters, called preighters, took off.
A Portuguese charter operator Hi Fly led this trend, becoming the first to convert an A380 for freight, removing most of its seats to provide space for cargo. The prevalence of preighters is likely to continue in the coming years. In fact, despite ongoing challenges in the air cargo industry, IATA predicts a 25% increase in freight tonne-kilometers this year.
Boeing, on the other hand, expects the global freighter fleet to grow by more than 60% over the next twenty years, totaling 3,260 operational aircraft by 2039.
Preference for Smaller Aircraft
Before the pandemic, there were already indications that airlines would start looking to use smaller, more efficient aircraft in the future for environmental and economic reasons. Now, all of those decisions have been made at a breakneck pace.
Most of all 747 freighter aircraft, for example, have or are being retired. Airlines around the world are increasingly grounding their A380s in favor of more modern and smaller jets that can fly more efficiently than their bigger, four-engine aviation counterparts.
With far fewer passengers flying now, the lower demand has accelerated decisions to park planes, some permanently, putting further strain on the already-dwindling resource of global air freight capacity. We should thus expect to see more interest in smaller aircraft like the A220.
Moving the Vaccines
As vaccines continue to be administered at a rapid pace, the demand for air cargo capable of successfully delivering them is expected to increase.
Because COVID-19 vaccines belong to different technology families, with some having frozen and deep-frozen temperature requirements, this has led to rapid efforts to qualify existing shipping infrastructures to deliver at those specific low temperatures.
Due to all of the sea freight challenges, transportation rates have doubled, and there has been some substitution for air freight, but not as much as pharmaceutical companies would have liked. We should expect to see a continuing trend of smaller aircraft with reduced air freight capacities being used to move pharmaceutical products at temperatures that sea freight cannot.
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