America’s Dependence on Flight-by-Night Operators (cont.)

If anything, airports are widely regarded as joyless purgatories where passengers are obliged to endure serial indignities with some hope of eventually arriving at the same destination as their luggage. Scarcely anyone associates airports with freight shipments. Mail, definitely; express packages, sure; but the idea that worldwide, some 40 percent of the value of internationally traded goods these days is shipped by air is usually greeted with amazement, if not utter disbelief.

It is peculiar, though, that this news should surprise anyone. Items shipped by air typically have high value-to-weight ratios, a characteristic that encompasses much of what is produced by sophisticated, advanced technology industries. Electronics components, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, a wide range of time-sensitive goods as well as documents vital to the legal and financial professions are routinely shipped by air. Even food products, including Maine lobsters, Chesapeake Bay clams and Washington State cherries take flights. California’s airborne agricultural export trade alone exceeds $600 million per year.

Moreover, the ability to transport goods by air is particularly critical in times of emergency.While this is most obviously true in the case of relief supplies for disaster victims, airborne shipments are frequently used to fix supply chain snafus. In the fall of 2002, for example, when docks along the West Coast were closed for several days due to labor strife, numerous companies such as Dell Computer and Toyota chartered air freighters to keep their U.S. assembly lines running.

Air transport industry forecasts uniformly predict healthy increases in air cargo volumes over the next two decades. But whether America’s air cargo infrastructure will be able to meet this rising demand is another question altogether.

Restrictions to growth

The policymaking myopia that causes elected officials to instinctively think of foreign trade as primarily a maritime activity is likely to have some not-so-trivial consequences. Just as the nation’s seaports need to prepare for a doubling or tripling of trade volumes over the next two decades, so too do the nation’s airports.

Regrettably, like much of the rest of America’s transportation infrastructure, most U.S. airports are legacies of a much different era.With few exceptions, nearly all of the country’s major airports – from Boston’s Logan to San Diego’s Lindbergh – were built decades ago on sites that have long since been enveloped by the sprawl of industry and housing. Even worse, their runways and other facilities were laid out long before anyone could anticipate not just the explosion of passenger air travel, but the impact that e-commerce, global supply chains and just-in-time delivery would have on the air transport industry. In short, virtually all of the country’s older airports are either at or close to capacity, with little or no room to expand.

To make matters worse, decades of short-sighted land-use policies have created vocal anti-airport constituencies. Efforts to increase airport operations almost anywhere in the land, especially if air cargo flights are involved, invariably encounter intense local opposition. Air freight operations have been especially sensitive since they tend to be relegated to late evening or early morning hours when passenger flight traffic is minimal. For all intents and purposes, Federal Express and UPS, which have come to dominate the U.S. air cargo market in the last decade, are literally fly-by-night operators.

So it is understandable that those who live within the sound contours of airports can become upset whenever plans are announced to increase the frequency of nocturnal flights. They and others are likewise apt to lobby against any increases in airport operations, arguing that the result will be more surface traffic and more air pollution to neighboring communities. To placate local critics, airport authorities have frequently been forced to curtail times of operation and require departing and arriving aircraft to follow strict noise-abatement measures. Even so, airports across the nation have been obliged to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to soundinsulate nearby homes or buy them outright for demolition.

The conflicts airports everywhere have with neighboring communities are unfortunate because airports can be important catalysts for regional economic growth. Just as cities once prospered by virtue of their location on important waterways or overland trade routes, it is difficult to conceive of a modern metropolis that can flourish without efficient air links to transport people and goods around the world. Certainly, communities eager to forge a strong economic base featuring highly competitive companies have a special need for airports able to provide extensive cargo services.

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