A good trend

Boris Badenov said:
I had a similar experience last winter. Picked up some car parts in mo except oops they didn't have a forklift. And then the semi got lost. Then there was a ground stop for weather. When I got to detroit on the bleeding edge of my duty time, the guy driving the truck (a furloughed dc-9 driver for usa jet) didn't have a way to unload the palletes (apparently they didn't tell him what was coming.) went to the hotel, stuff was gone in the morning. Whos running this circus, anyway?
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Thats what makes the on demand stuff so interesting. The last charter I did was video games out of Georgia to Teterboro. I started in CVG getting down to the small town in Georgia. The freight showed 3 hours late and the pallets didn't fit through the door. So they had to loose load a couple of thousand boxes. It took another couple of hours. There was weather to weeve and bob around on the way up to TEB which caused me to get into there even later. When I finally got there, each box had to be sorted and counted by the two drivers. They were contract drivers......who were paid by the hour. You can imagine how long that took. It ended up being a 15.9hr duty day!:D
 
jdlilfan said:
They were. Down to just a few DC-9s and the falcons were mothballed. Now the Falcons are coming back online and the pax and cargo dc-9's have been pretty busy. Both Kalitta and USA jet cargo 9's have been doing auto parts recently at my airport.

Funny story with a kalitta dc-9 charter...

GM chartered it to get a set of engine blocks to the factory ASAP from a tractor trailer that was already driving to the factory. The semi was enroute to Detroit and was passing through Indiana and they routed it to our airport for the charter. Well the Semi arrived but it took almost 2 hours for the chartered dc-9 to show up. Then it took over an hour and a half to unload the semi because it had to be done at our loading dock then each individual pallet had to be fork lifted over to the plane. About 1/4 mile away from the dock. Then the crew had complications with the paperwork. etc. etc. So all in all it took about 4 hours or more for the auto parts to go from the semi to its destination (nevermind unloading from the plane onto another semi then transport to the factory, maybe looking at 6 hours?)

So if the semi would have kept driving to its original destination as intended it would have been there in 4hrs, 5hrs max. How much does it cost to provide 2 semi's and a DC-9?

Wonder why GM is broke?
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I'm VERY aware of why GM is broke :)
 
Sounds like the cargo game is back on all around. Hopefully the pax world shows some renewed life soon too

To the AMFers, my feeling used to be 'i dont care what we're getting because i just want out.' now its more like 'well im totally stuck here so hopefully we get new stuff.'
 
I've seen a rush of on demand locally (I'm the kid unloading it at 3am :)). I've been able to talk to some of the pilots and they seem optimistic about growth in the future.
 
If in fact on-demand freight is one of the first signs of recovery, and it is increasing as much as you say it is, thats a good thing for all of us that are trying to find jobs, such as yours truly.
 
hope I'm hearing wrong but I'm hearing the uptick is almost all cash for clunkers restocking, and this temporary. Again, hope that's just more uninformed gossip.
 
Well, just a few things

One, most stuff through HACTL isn't "on-demand" stuff.

Second, I don't fly for an "on-demand" company, we fly DHL express. I've been jumping alot on FedEx, and those guys are reporting the same. Big Airplanes flying scheduled and express freight are filling up.

Third, we all know capacity is being cut, but it seems that the actual freight is leveling off. Emirates wanted more flying for peak, which cause Atlas to recall 15.

It's been this way since March.

I think there will be fits and spurts, but everything seems to be starting to stabilize. The planes have been consistently full for 8 or 9 months now, and there are still companies cutting.

I'm not saying there will be growth, but I think we may have leveled off. There may be some more minor declines, but I'm thinking movement in the sub 5% range for awhile in either direction, the -28% stuff seems to be over.

Hopefully this is a good thing for all of us. This is (obviously) my first down cycle in this industry, but we were flying empty jets about 6 months or so prior to the stock market collapse.

Here's to freight leveling off..... :beer:
 
Boris Badenov said:
hope I'm hearing wrong but I'm hearing the uptick is almost all cash for clunkers restocking, and this temporary. Again, hope that's just more uninformed gossip.
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From what I have gathered from the planes passing through for either gas or to pick up parts to take to Mexico, this is true. Unless the country decides to waste tax money again, I see the auto-part freight to be dead here soon.

On a not so good note, Seems like Kallita's lift has been good but its not the good kind of freight. We have one of those charters coming in on Monday. :(
 
We've picked up a old run back in the 1900 out of Del Rio, Tx. Generally the only thing on that plane was parts going on Ford's until it got cx.
 
it seems like on demand is either doing great or non-existant at the moment (depending on the week), and lately that it's hard to rely on. I hope it comes back to being a reliable source of income, but I don't see that for a year or two at minimum. I hope I'm wrong.
 
7 more bros were bought on the 9th and being sent to STL or one of them crap holes for the finish work.
 
JayAre said:
We've picked up a old run back in the 1900 out of Del Rio, Tx. Generally the only thing on that plane was parts going on Ford's until it got cx.
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I fly the MRA Caravan out of DRT, and I hope this isn't true. Theres been an AMF 99 on this route for about a month backing me up but 80% of the time he goes empty.
 
gomntwins said:
it seems like on demand is either doing great or non-existant at the moment (depending on the week), and lately that it's hard to rely on. I hope it comes back to being a reliable source of income, but I don't see that for a year or two at minimum. I hope I'm wrong.
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Nail on head.....

In September we were sold on a trip before we woke up, and the second we were legal we were headed to the bird.... It's moderately busy now, we're doing around 2 - 3 trips a week now, we're doing on average 6 - 8k miles a week.
 
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