(Istanbul Exclusive)—This great city is still a destination
on the classic Orient Express, which alas now runs only once a year:
Paris-Budapest-Bucharest-Istanbul.
You will be relieved that airfare is actually
far less expensive than the fabled Venice Simplon-Orient-Express…
and you don’t have to wait until September.
On the other hand, business class doesn’t
feature Lalique glass panels and wood-burning stoves, not to mention
veneered, inlaid wood panels.
Turkey’s first five star hotel,
the Hilton Istanbul is centrally located near the Taksim district with
commanding views over the city, so swank it is.
Thus the backdrop for this year’s
“World Cargo Symposium” by IATA is all set and ready to
roll.
This is the first event under new management;
that is Des Vertannes’ show and imprimatur.
Next year will be a first under a new
IATA director general.
There is the very first World Cargo Symposium
with an—optional—annual golf tournament, to be had for a
paltry $210. Otherwise, the traditional format is basically the same;
the annual industry meetings accompanied by twelve commercial “tracks”
running in parallel, and the egalitarian opening plenary.
The industry meetings are for IATA members
only. That means the delegates, with a separate ‘business class,’
higher tier executive level set of meetings.
All is outsourced for full event management
by WorldTEK.
The packaging effort earns a nod.
“Showcasing your solutions”
to the air cargo community is offered in a professional manner, but
there is the small matter of the price.
Sponsoring a track, the gala dinner or
a lunch “networking opportunities,” in marketing speak,
ranges from $6,500 to $50,000 with branding “opportunities”
– eco-friendly water bottles for example, between $2,000 and $12,500,
nothing for the faint of heart yet, nonprofit or not, one has to feed
the voracious money machine somehow!
To be fair and all-inclusive, there are
also exhibiting “opportunities” for $5,000 a stand.
The WCS registration fee is $1,595 (it
is $1,395 for members and strategic partners) and ‘noblesse oblige’
– EUR 140 a night for the hotel room, $118 for the symposium dinner,
not to mention the cost of airfare; taken all together, it virtually
guarantees the right audience and suitable decorum.
The industry meetings and the tracks are
almost a one-to-one match, i.e., air mail, dangerous goods, e-freight,
and ULD management, just to name a few.
One could almost forget the setting and
the times – the one thing that will not be addressed are fuel
prices and the turmoil in the Middle East, lest someone gets an overdose
of reality.
Now to the meat and potatoes: it will
be interesting to see some of the subject matter experts IATA cargo
employs in the meetings and tracks, especially when it comes to disciplines
such as ULD management and Live Animals and Perishables.
It looks like expertise in these areas
has been traded and sacrificed in the course of routine, across the
board personnel cuts. This has also been reflected in some outdated
manuals – the ULD Technical Manual has been cited as one such
case, although the issue is actually more complicated.
New B777 and B748 data would have been
made available by the manufacturer, but would also be subject to U.S.
government Export Administration Regulations, thus potentially limiting
IATA’s ability to disseminate it to all takers, and possibly into
hostile hands. This is a conflict that ideally shouldn’t exist
for an organization whose purpose is to serve its members and promote
aviation in general and safety in particular.
Whether the gap between marketing façade
and deliverables narrows any time soon remains to be seen.
Not updating manuals such as the ULD Technical
Manual, Perishable Cargo Regulations, and Live Animals Regulations regularly
and in a timely fashion, and retaining the industry’s institutional
expertise and memory is not a good practice.
There is the orphan Airport Handling Manual
(which is not under the Cargo Services Conference purview, but rather
the Airport Services Committee) and includes highly pertinent procedures,
including, for example, how to secure an automobile (certainly not by
running a strap through the open car doors).
Some of this internal dysfunctional structure
and state of affairs is self-inflicted and has been recognized, as documented
in the IATA 2010-2012 ULD Roadmap which set specific milestones after
concluding ULD matters must be aligned across these silos.
Additional concerns have been voiced regarding
the ‘EasyDGR’ IATA apparently launched without a beta testing
period, which was allegedly redolent with more bugs than should be the
case. In the value for money category, this product comes with a one
year, single user license of $1,499.
The flagship IATA publication, the Dangerous
Goods Regulations, had a sizeable corrigendum event before it became
effective and some of the translated versions are rather poor, to put
it charitably.
While an e-freight Handbook and eShipper’s
Declaration are keeping with times, it’s much more difficult to
find some basic information, such as air waybill completion, examples
that illustrate whether Other Charges ought to be calculated based on
actual or chargeable weight.
There has always been enormous potential
to do right in IATA and this should be possible once its priorities
are set correctly.
"When you think about it, whilst
IATA preaches paperless freight, in practice many of their paper
offerings (including rules, regulations and other guideline disciplines)
are hopelessly out of date.
‘Updating needed,’ goes back at IATA, which should
practice what it preaches." |
The organizers have succeeded in attracting
a truly impressive array of speakers for which they deserve credit;
it’s a veritable who’s who of this global industry.
Several major airline heads of cargo and
CEOs are on the program – Cathay Pacific, Delta Airlines, Emirates,
Global Cargo (UPS), Jet Airways, Lufthansa Cargo, MASkargo, Swiss, Turkish
Airlines, and Atlas Air.
The FIATA president, the executive VP
global cargo at Swissport, the World Customs Organization deputy secretary
general, UPU, ACI, and a number of government representatives from the
US DHS/TSA, USPS, the EC, the Malaysian department of civil aviation,
a deputy under-secretary from the Turkish ministry of transport –
all are on hand.
Freight forwarders are also on the program
– DHL, K+N, OHL, A number of leading vendors are well represented
– Unisys, Traxon, Mercator, JDA, Descartes, CHAMP, Airbus and
so forth.
Rounding off the list are several airports
and shippers. All these executives and decision makers obviously consider
the IATA WCS significant enough to take the time to participate and
contribute.
It goes without saying that the least
IATA can do is rise to the occasion and respond in kind, beyond its
internal goals.
This year’s event has been dubbed
“air cargo connecting the world “ and meetings started Monday
morning according to the official World Cargo Symposium ‘roadmap,’
followed by the opening plenary Tuesday morning, with the ‘program
tracks’ starting Tuesday afternoon, running alongside the obligatory
industry meetings. This pattern continues on Wednesday and Thursday.
Each track has one or more keynote speakers
and a panel.
This format essentially separates the
delegates participating in meetings from tracks’ speakers, moderators,
panelists and attendees.
It may be a dichotomy that an event labeled
as the prime forum for bringing together industry experts and stakeholders
has settled on a format which de facto guarantees this cannot happen,
except after hours.
The show is the show, and then there are
the other 360 days of the year and we have the same question this year
as in previous ones – what happens after the doors close and the
delegates go home to their everyday work? Beyond a high level, networking
sojourn, how will the time and money spent to attend make a real, measurable
difference?
More shall be revealed!
Ted Braun
|
As
air cargo gathers this week in Turkey, the TRAXON team has set a presence
at WCS underscoring the importance of this market.
“The quality of past WCSs has
been very uneven, with a very good one happening before the last one,
followed by the last which was insufficiently prepared and followed-up.
Giovanni Bisignani, IATA’s Director
General and CEO, who is on his last round of the rubber chicken circuit
engagements (he speaks at Wings Club in New York later this month
before retiring at mid-year), now says oil prices driven by political
unrest in Middle East & Africa are throwing a big wet towel on
earlier predictions.
"Security matters in air freight
are shifting step by step from forwarders, shippers and truckers on
to us, the handling agents of cargo. 
Issa
Baluch, the founder of Dubai based Swift Freight and now as Professor
sharing his knowledge with undergraduates and academia at Harvard
University, may know as much about logistics as anybody you ever met.
Like
many of his global colleagues, John Batten, EVP Cargo at Swissport the
giant global handling company based in Zürich, Switzerland is in
beautiful Istanbul for the Fifth World Cargo Symposium (WCS) March 8-10.
Michael
Steen, who has been in the news quite a bit lately as the 2011 Chairman
guiding The International Air Cargo Association (TIACA), also balances
that great service to air cargo with his daytime job as Executive Vice
President and Chief Commercial Officer at Atlas Air World Holdings,
which happens to be the biggest, most important ACMI operation on the
planet.
