Issa Baluch may know as much about logistics as anybody you will ever meet. During a long and illustrious career in logistics, he has won almost every award that has been given by any transportation publication or organization.
Issa is a heavy-weight dreamer and doer who takes nothing for granted, whilst working hard, sharing with others openly and freely, giving back to the industry and its people.
Here he shares his views of two important issues in air cargo.

Issa Quits TIACA Scores Diversity, October 10, 2013
Africa Is The Last Frontier, February 19, 2013

     Word that the great Issa Baluch has quit his position on TIACA’s Board and is “very unhappy with the direction the organization is taking in 2013.”
     Always outspoken, Issa lays it on the line, saying:
     “I am a firm believer in change and am open to change in any organization, but it must be change that benefits the entire organization, not just a select few.
     “The reason for my resignation actually relates to what I just said about change.
     “In the last few years, TIACA’s traditional culture was broken by a few in that group who recruited a vice chairman from outside the members of the board.
     “The rationale presented was that the current chairman preferred a vice chairman that he personally knew well and who he could be sure would carry out the chairman’s agenda.
     “This became the most important objective in electing officers.
     “Current board members were not considered for office because they were not personal friends of the chairman.
     “This cycle has repeated through the last three elections of officers.
     “Only with the last one of these three was any effort made to stop the practice, but it is too little too late.
     “A cosmetic change in the bylaws was made but the door to external nomination is still wide open.
     “TIACA’s long tradition of collaboration, open debate, and consensus building has been replaced with a private sector, top down control of that association.
     “I have had some 30 years of experience serving on the board of various trade associations.
     “One volunteers for these positions to advance and serve the interests of a particular industry as a whole, rather than for narrow self-interest and private agendas. So care should be taken as to those who are given office to insure that the organization’s culture and broad objectives continue.
     “Sadly, TIACA’s leadership during the past few years has continued the focus on their own narrow interests rather than the interests of the membership as a whole.
     “The assets of the many, earned over many years, are now appropriated to fund the agenda of the few.”


     “The biggest part of TIACA’s membership and area of growth are the SMEs, but board and officer recruitment efforts have focused solely on large multinationals to the exclusion of everyone else.
     “In my mind, it is crucial that the board be representative of the entire industry and TIACA’s wide membership, as it has traditionally been.
     “TIACA’s diversity is what gave it its unique role and credibility as the true representative of the air cargo industry.
     “I remained on the board to advocate this view until the point that I found I could no longer prevail against this current tide of large corporate interests and lack of diversity,” Issa Baluch said.
Geoffrey

From my point of view a part of South Africa is still living under sanctions of the past. The other part is striving to make change. The contrast is stark and in the general scheme of things, certainly worth seeing.
     There are two issues which are close to my heart that affect the aviation industry in Africa.

     The first is Open Sky policy.
     With just a few exceptions, Africa still applies very strict landing rights that are archaic in nature and designed to protect their small airlines.
     These restrictions are one of the major bottlenecks to growth as it suffocates imports and exports of the local produce.
     Just look, for example, to Kenya that has developed into a leader in cut flowers because of their Open Sky policy.
     Elsewhere, Egypt is a top exporter of green beans because of the right policies. Ghana is on top because of pineapples and allowing airlines and charter operators to fly in/out easily.


     The second item that needs to be addressed if the Africa market is to move ahead is the need to open up secondary airports to relieve the main airports from pressure and to develop other regions of the continent.
     Just look at the numbers:
     Of the 56 countries in Africa, about 53 delivered positive GDP in 2012 and have done so consistently during the past 3 years.
     Consumer goods are anticipated to reach a trillion dollars by 2020 for a growing African middle class estimated at 350 million.

      Worth mentioning as well is that in almost every country there are ample supplies of either gas, oil, or both as well as vast real estate packed with minerals.
     Africa indeed is the last economic frontier.
     The main stars moving ahead in my opinion are Ghana, Botswana, Rwanda, and Tanzania.


     Right now political stability and the right policies are taking these countries into double-digit growth.
     And there are 33 other African countries that now have multi-party political systems and have held elections.
     So things are changing.
     The elections in Ghana in December of 2012 were historic.
     Very peaceful and the message across the country was clear: ballots and not bullets.

     Opening up the African market top to bottom will require a massive influx of trained specialists be brought to the fore.
     Personally I would like to see various international and also local African associations cooperate in tackling the issue of training.
     The internationals can help in the trainers programs so that local associations can move forward in devising apprenticeship programs.
     One thing is for certain: there is no time to repeat the mistake in Africa by approaching the market with high expectations and no patience.
Geoffrey

     From time to time, we have the sad duty to report the passing of a person whose contributions were paramount to making the aviation industry what it is today. On other occasions, we take the liberty to highlight the retirement of something important, such as the recent phase out of FedEx’s last 727.
     Although this is an obituary for IATA’s Dangerous Goods documentation software product—dubbed EasyDGR—there’s no sadness on our side, and we would assume there is none on the side of IATA’s customers as well.
     The SAAS product (Software-as-a-service) EasyDGR was IATA’s first product that directly targeted the shipper.
     It aimed at making the onerous task of issuing the “Shipper’s Declaration for Dangerous Goods” a more customer-friendly and less time-consuming task.
     Launched in 2010, EasyDGR was certainly a promising product, targeting those shippers whose shipping needs called for something small and didn’t require dedicated hardware and software. Subsequently,      EasyDGR ran on any device that could display web content. Since it came from IATA, the makers of the IATA Dangerous Goods Regulations, it did not need all too much convincing for shippers to sign up; a main promise of EasyDGR was to make compliance with variations of states and airlines easier. Variations, for those not familiar with the term, are particular requirements by both states and airlines in addition to the general requirements.
     Since the system allowed the creation of templates and the import of address databases (for example, from standard mail clients such as MS Outlook) and provided for options to store the commodities a shipper needed most, it seemed like a fitting solution for the small- and medium-sized shipper.
     However, resources dedicated to the development of the product at IATA were lacking, so the commercial launch of the product saw the hapless initial users being used as involuntary beta testers.
     The errors were numerous and more often than not, EasyDGR created documents that were not in accordance with IATA’s rules, or sometimes only just made for annoying shortcomings (such as stretching DG information for two UN-numbers, packed together in one package, over three letter-sized pages).
     The fact that the system managed to lift off was owed to the support given by IATA’s cargo department; however, whenever external contractors had to be called in for support or software modification, disappointment in the customer community grew. As early as mid-2011, IATA started to resort to a policy of “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”—a policy even Microsoft abandoned in the early 90s.
     The promise from IATA to localize the EasyDGR product to the languages supported by the IATA Dangerous Goods Regulations (French, Spanish, German, Russian, and a licensed Japanese version) thus never materialized.

     In a desperate attempt to turn the looming demise of EasyDGR around, IATA shed the price by about 50 percent in mid-2012.
     This, however, without informing their authorized resellers, so EasyDGR was available for purchase on IATA’s website for about half the money resellers were charging for the product.
     In December 2012, a system message informed EasyDGR users after login that “EasyDGR core functionality would not be available until presumably the end of March 2013” where users switched from the 53rd Edition of the IATA DGR (valid until December 31st, 2012) to the 54th Edition, effective January 1st, 2013. No further explanation or apologies were offered, and requests just yielded the result that “there are issues with implementing the changes in the 54th edition.”
     March, April, and May went without the system becoming available again.
     So did June, July, and August.
     In the meantime, most customers had given up any hope that EasyDGR would ever be usable again and claimed refunds for the unusable product, which IATA did process.
     We can report with a certain joy and satisfaction that IATA has released a communication to (former) EasyDGR users, which officially proclaimed the product dead:
     “On 27 November, IATA will be discontinuing EasyDGR. This means that as of the end of the day, the access to online features and functionality for all accounts will be terminated. As you are aware, IATA had earlier removed access to shipper declaration creation pending updates to the declaration validation engine – the core functionality of EasyDGR. However, ongoing DGR rules changes and amendments have made it impossible to properly update the system logic used to validate that shipper’s declarations have been correctly created. As safety is paramount, the inability for the underlying system to assure this accuracy forces us to take this drastic step.”
     We may want to read this little gem of a statement twice:
     “Ongoing DGR rules changes and amendments have made it impossible to properly update the system logic used to validate that shipper’s declarations have been correctly created.”
     Nicely put.
     In plain English, this means: Either the rules were too complicated or the system was not capable of handling the rules.
     Since the maker of these very rules developed the system, it’s hard to blame anyone else. Indeed, it is most noteworthy that IATA, an organization with a considerable track record in the drafting and development of standards, which continuously pushes for further implementation of e-freight and subsequent cost saving, is calling their own system “unsafe.”
     Possibly Ralph Nader should consider publishing a second volume to his 1965 book Unsafe At Any Speed titled: Unusable In Any Environment.
     It is also noteworthy that competing IT products, among these commercial solutions used by IATA member airlines, seem not to have been plagued with the inability to put the changed rules into system logic, such as the FedEx ShipManager and the DGM Office solution.
     Both organizations—FedEx as a member carrier and DGM as a training partner—are affiliated with IATA and it is hard to see why IATA was seemingly unable to draw on this expertise.
     It’s time the industry takes certain actions and statements from IATA with the proverbial grain of salt.
     Your Move.
JENS

The first air cargo journalist, Richard Malkin wrote and edited the publication Air Transportation, which began in 1942 and later covered The Berlin Airlift. Malkin singlehandedly invented modern air cargo journalism, so it is to all our benefit that he continues his landmark “Richard Malkin In His Own Write,” exclusively in FlyingTypers.
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