Your lowly rating structure reflects the way in how you treat cargo. I wish you would stop saying you are in the supply chain management business. Listen, your record of handling passenger baggage has even been declining at nearly the same rate as you look after commercial airfreight. It is not about the IT systems you have in place to record the supposed movement of freight, it is about the people you employ at the coal face. In the hack-slash world of cutting costs, American carriers have brought everything down to the lowest common denominator. Pay peanuts and you get monkeys.

Cargo Heads such as American Airline’s David Brooks think they are gurus in the class of FedEx’s Fred Smith as they travel the world to standing on any platform they can to tell the world how expert they are at logistics. Dave, every time we use your crummy airline something always happens to prove how woeful your service is. If the freight is not shut out at origin, it goes missing at an intermediary point, but if it is lucky enough to get to destination it gets lost in your terminal. The worst thing is, when you are up to your eyeballs in alligators in exasperation, try speaking to anyone who has the ability to provide an answer that will appease a customer! Talk about goobly-gook and double-Dutch! So Dave, can you spend a little time with your feet planted firmly on the ground instead of your head in cloud cuckoo land and address the issues that cause your airline to constantly muck up.

Firstly, employ some key people who know something about something and pay them well. Secondly, take a look at your resources and determine what you can and cannot handle. Thirdly, teach your handling agents how to handle freight and properly record everything. You may need a bar-coding system to help you for starters. Make a manifest up for every ULD, so the split shipment nightmares become something of the past. How about holding your handlers accountable. You see Dave, American Airlines may have more aircraft than any other, but most of them are simply unsuitable for cargo. Instead of taking bookings in kilograms, why don’t you go a step further and demand the cubic measurement and preferably with the carton dimensions as well? Your aircraft do not have elastic sides, my boy.

So mate, like your American carrier competitors, get your head out of your ass, forget about the supply chain nonsense and get back to basics. You and your employer might just earn a little more respect at the end of the day, if you could just start under-committing and over delivering. We are living in solemn times and we would readily forgive you if you just became honest with yourself.

This year’s get together covers every topic imaginable and it certainly will be interesting to listen to the views from such a wide variety of industry experts. As far as the airlines are concerned the only topic not on the agenda is how most carriers have retreated from regarding airfreight as a serious component of their structure. For me, barring a very few airlines, over the past fifteen years most airline CEO’s have used the surgeon’s scalpel on their air cargo divisions to the point they are unrecognizable from twenty years ago. Sales and service personnel have been slashed and in many instances cargo handling outsourced to independent contractors even at large airports such as Los Angeles. In the meantime, IATA ambitiously moves forward promoting Cargo 2000 and complicated supply chain theories when many of their members operations are returning to the “stone ages”!

On the one hand we have most IATA airline members who couldn’t care less about cargo, but on the other, forwarders/shippers who have never enjoyed such low rates for such a long period of time. I suppose it is all about getting what you pay for. However in saying that, when will we see a return to airlines treating cargo seriously with an upswing in real investment and a compensatory rating structure to match? I notice at this year’s “Symposium” every subject under the sun is being discussed except the issue of the real future of airfreight as far as most passenger/combination carriers are concerned.