News / Air cargo services spared major disruption from US government shutdown

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US airfreight appears to have largely been shielded from the chaos brought about by the longest government shutdown in the country’s history, with expectations that any affected schedules could be back to normal this weekend.

Judah Levine, head of research at Freightos, said during the company’s monthly Global Freight and Trade War Outlook, that while the government shutdown had provoked a phased-in drawdown on US flight numbers, cargo had largely been spared.

“The shutdown lasted over 40 days and led to a shortage of air traffic controllers, and therefore a planned phase-in of a 10% reduction in flights, which only got up to about 6%,” he said at the event attended by The Loadstar.

“It’s been disrupting domestic passenger travel, and therefore the bellyhold cargo that goes along, but domestic freighters and international flights, which account for the bulk of the US air cargo market, were spared.”

Mr Levine said the overall impact of the shutdown on freight had been “minimal”, adding that he expected little further impact amid the resumption of normal service.

He suggested that schedules would return to normal within 12 to 36 hours, although he acknowledged that some carriers were forecasting that the situation would not “get fully back to normal” for up to a week.

“So, it seems that the worst of the impact from the shutdown is now behind us and it has not had a major impact on the cargo market in the US, which is also dealing with the fatal crash of an MD-11 freighter in Kentucky,” Mr Levine said.

“The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has grounded MD-11s until they can all be inspected. There are about 50. They are mostly in use by UPS and FedEx and most of them are domestic, 10 or so are international.”

Of the 50, FedEx owns 34, of which six are parked and three are spare, leaving 25 in operation prior to the incident. CFO John Dietrich said these were now positioned for inspection, due to begin imminently.

Stressing that safety was “paramount”, Mr Dietrich said that even before the FAA had issued notice that the MD-11s were to be grounded, FedEx had voluntarily taken the decision to do so.

The integrator’s CEO, Rajesh Subramaniam, noted: “I met with the senior executives at Boeing, and there’s a deep sense of cooperation and urgency, working with the regulators to get through this period as quickly as possible, putting safety above all.”

Once an aircraft was inspected and released, Mr Dietrich said it would be put back into service on “a one-off, tail-by-tail basis,” adding the company would not be waiting for the whole fleet to be inspected before putting individual aircraft back in the air.

In the interim, FedEx will adjust its maintenance schedules to make use of that capacity while also leveraging what the CFO described as “strong relationships with commercial partners” to make use of additional commercial airlift.

“Because 18 of the MD-11s are in our domestic network, and we’ve a superior domestic network on the ground side, we are going to leverage that as well to adjust to volumes in the US domestic market,” he added.