News / Billund Airport sets out plans for future IT platform as volumes grow

Billund Airport has outlined its plans for its future, and said it will consider a cargo community system and is in preliminary talks with IT providers.

The airport is set to see volumes grow, in particular from the fourth quarter when Maersk moves its air freight operations to the Danish airport.

Kaspar Andreas Nissen, the airport’s market & route development manager, told The Loadstar: “We have a huge potential to further establish direct freighter routes to and from BLL. While this has been (and will continue to be) one of our priorities for the past years, we have already started to consider how we can further create efficient settings for all stakeholders, including when and how to establish a formalised Air Cargo Community with an IT system to support it.

“We are very well aware of all the advantages of an established Air Cargo Community – we have been seeing the positive effects of this for years now in the major European airports. However, based on historic volumes moved through BLL, level of complexity at operations and current peaks, we have simply not come to a point yet where we have had to decide when and how to go ahead.

“With the recent announcements and the building of a Scandinavian air freight hub, I’m pretty sure though that we are moving quite quickly towards that point.”

He said formalising the community would start when the airport could see value for members.

“We are already talking to a number of stakeholders and users of the airport with relation to cargo activities on this matter. We believe this is how airport communities are best built, by discussing continuously with all stakeholders on important matters, bringing in ideas to co-develop and to actively engage all stakeholders, not only freight forwarders and handlers.

“Simultaneously we are having premature talks with several IT-vendors to have an idea of who would best be able to support an organised community on efficient processes of operation. However, this is still only in the very beginning.”

Billund currently counts DHL, FedEx, Bluebird/UPS, Turkish Cargo, Time:matters and, from next month, Virgin Atlantic Cargo as customers.