Here
is a glimpse at our picks for the interesting session
tracks at IATA’s World Cargo Symposium (WCS),
taking place this week in Berlin, Germany, from March
15-17.The air cargo industry is gathering its
best and brightest for three days of face-to-face contact
and arou nd-the-clock
meetings.
WCS
celebrates its 10th go-round this year.
The mandated yearly gathering
of IATA member airlines’ cargo chieftains, which
has since the reign of IATA Head of Cargo Alex Popovich
been marketed as “World Cargo Symposium,”
has been an industry event and growing tradeshow profit
center for the past decade.
We are driven to talk about
session tracks content because of the dense number of
WCS meetings and sessions (some running concurrently).
Our thought is that most cannot
afford an army of people to attend them all, and so
there is a very good chance you might miss something
important.
Here are some highlights:
 Perishables
Track
Wednesday
March 16, 11:40 - 12:25
Shipper’s
Expectations Meet the Air Cargo Value Proposition
Perishables panelist Natasha
Solano also serves as Global Business Development Manager,
Perishables Logistics, Kuehne+Nagel.
Natasha has been involved in
the transportation and logistics of temperature sensitive
goods by air and ocean for the past 18 years, since
she began at Martinair Cargo.
Natasha offered some interesting
views on ocean versus air last year at the Caspian Summit
in Baku.
She said that over the last
few years there had been a trend for perishable cargo
to transfer over to ocean transport due to costs, new
routes, and advanced technology, including refrigerated
sea containers.
“Temperatures of airborne
perishables tend to vary because of the number of times
shipments are handled, but seafreight is loaded into
a container and then not usually handled again until
delivery,” she said.
She suggested air cargo should
ensure staff is well versed as to the impact of temperature
fluctuations upon perishable cargo.
 ULD
Track
Wednesday
March 16, 9:15 - 10:30
Sharing
Responsibility for Safe ULD Operations
Urs Wiesendanger (right) is
a panelist and he will certainly want to raise awareness
of ULD Cares, the industry group with which he has been
intertwined for quite some time. ULD Cares is holding
its next Annual Conference in Los Angeles, California,
from August 29 to September 1st, 2016.
 The best time we ever had in
a ULD was sitting with some Alitalia Cargo workers picketing
Cargo Building 6 at JFK. It started to rain, and after
about 15 minutes the pitter-patter sound of the drops
on the metal above us formed a soporific cloud over
our senses.
We are reminded, in the grip
of any sort of insomnia, that the best remedy is to
sit under a tin roof for a while.
 When it comes to ULDs, there
a few outstanding people—Urs from Air Canada,
and Bob Rogers from Nordisk (retired, left). Both are
known for their knowledgeable presentations delivered
at industry meetings such as the IATA WCS and the TIACA
ACF. They have dedicated their professional lives to
raising awareness about the ‘unknown entity ULD’
and have played a pivotal role in spreading the word.
In 2016, ULD Cares is quite
proud of a nine-minute video it created promoting ULDs
in 2015.
But for our money, a couple
of minutes with Urs—with his lifelong love of
cans—is enough for us.
Give Urs 4 minutes, share in
our experience.
 Pharma
Track
Wednesday
March 16, 14:00-15:05
Pharmaceutical
Management: Compliance, Cooperation, Solutions
Nina Heinz (right) has been
Global Head of Quality, LifeConEx DHL Global Forwarding
for the past 10 years and is Chairman of this session.
Prior to her career at LifeConEx,
Nina worked with Lufthansa Cargo for several years as
a global account manager for key pharmaceutical customers
in Europe.
Sustainability
Track
Wednesday
March 16, 14:00-15:00
Sustaining
Our Value In The Future
Zoe Arden (right) is Director
(London office) of SustainAbility, a company that states
its mission is to “catalyze innovation and provide
solutions to make business and markets sustainable.”
Zoe says she specializes in
“sustainability strategy, stakeholder engagement,
and story telling.”
“I am hugely excited
to be working at SustainAbility. It is an organization
with an impressive heritage, strong values, a talented
team, and a big role to play in the future of conscientious
responsible business.”
e-Commerce
Track
Wednesday
March 16, 16:15-17:00
Is
Air Cargo Ready For e-Commerce?
Is IATA kidding? Implementation
of eAWB is uneven everywhere and decades behind the
promise of anything being adopted industry wide.
However Vivien Lau, Managing
Director of HACIS has, for all intents and purposes,
figured this thing out and is incredibly positive on
the subject.
The beauty part for greater
air cargo is that Vivien is willing to share.
“As a logistics provider
serving the sector, it’s a matter of adopting
a similar mindset and business mode with e-commerce,
which attracts a host of buyers by providing good products
with attractive prices,” Vivien Lau said.
“I believe the link between
air and road is the trend for e-commerce,” Ms.
Lau added.
“As the e-commerce market
matures and becomes more price-driven, fulfillment is
moving closer to the market to achieve economies of
scale and cost reductions in logistics. Hong Kong has
the global air services needed by this growing business,
and Hacis’ opportunity is to provide reliable
and highly cost-efficient onward connections to the
new generation of e-commerce fulfillment centers in
China.”
A
Matter Of Dronamics
Thursday
March 17, 09:00- 10:15
Drones
for Tomorrow’s Air Cargo
 In
2015 when the Rangelov Brothers, Svilen and Konstantin
(l-r), won first place recognition amongst 1,600 companies
from 98 countries and a 100,000 Euro cash prize at the
“Pioneers Festival in Vienna” for their
start up company Dronamics, one writer wondered:
“Are the Rangelov Brothers
following in the footsteps of the Wright Brothers [in]
revolutionizing unmanned aircraft systems?”
Svilen Rangelov chairs the
last day of World Cargo Symposium in a session that
takes a deeper look at drones.
For the record, Dronamics is
a Sofia-based Bulgarian/Dutch company that confidently
insists: “Cargo will never be the same.”
“We’re creating
a next-generation drone—an airplane, actually—that
can dramatically optimize logistics networks,”
Svilen said.
“We are working to create
a smaller building block for the logistics industry
and enable on-demand solutions for shipping commercial
and special cargo,” Svilen Rangelov (right) said.
“Our unmanned cargo aircraft
can carry up to 350-kg payloads across routes exceeding
2,000 km and will be the first drones that can carry
such a payload for non-military use.
“By creating a smaller
building block, our drones will help reduce the inefficiencies
of the air cargo industry.
 “We firmly believe that
drones are the future of cargo, no question,”
Svilen told FlyingTypers adding that 20 or
even 10 years from now people would be looking back
and seeing how natural it was for the industry to evolve
in this particular direction.
“But to get there, we
need two unconditional prerequisites—safety and
cost.
“If it’s not safe,
we won't be allowed to—and we shouldn’t—use
this technology.
“And if it's not economically
feasible, it won’t work for a competitive industry
like air cargo.
“The only way to solve
this challenge, ” Svilen says, “is through
technology, but engineering a solution to both these
problems simultaneously is extremely hard—safety
and cost are two forces that too often act in opposite
directions.
“What makes us at Dronamics
confident in solving this challenge is the fact that
some of the brightest minds in aerospace engineering
are working with us on this exciting problem, and have
brought us further ahead than anyone in our journey
to making safe and economical drone cargo a reality.”
Svilen is also “Team
Member” of the “Sofia Pub Crawl,”
a group that finds interesting late-night Sofia spots,
as opposed to the loud tourist traps.
No word yet if Svilen will
be out and about in Berlin—which has become a
great pub town for young people—but don’t
bet against it.
In any case, this one sounds
like fun.
Geoffrey |
100%
Green