Austria-born Robert Strodel (left) has departed Indian newcomer Flyington Freighters and joined Moscow-based Air Bridge Cargo Airlines (ABC) with immediate effect.
     There, he'll soon take on a top management position, local sources say.
     People close to the matter however reveal that the contract details regarding his future competencies and influences within ABC are still being negotiated between Robert and Volga-Dnepr Group, the parent company of ABC.
     Meanwhile, the 57-year old air freight expert, who learned the cargo basics at Lufthansa, is expected to collaborate closely with ABC's General Director Gennady Pivovarov, (right) by actively supporting him in strategic and network issues.
     Since the departure of managing director Stan Wraight (left) in fall 2007, the Russian scheduled air freight carrier has gone through some rough times.
     Local managers came and left, long announced intercontinental flights were scrapped, the trans-polar route from Siberian Krasnoyarsk to destinations in the U.S. were never commenced.
      "Pivovarov and Strodel will have to reshape the network, streamline the operation and turn the carrier's business into profitability," comments market analyst Dirk Steiger (right) of Frankfurt-based Aviainform GmbH.
     German Rhein-Main airport is the main European gateway of ABC with up to a dozen frequencies per week. From there, the carrier's Boeing 747-400Fs are deployed on routes to Fareast via Moscow, Novosibirsk or Krasnoyarsk.
     In Frankfurt, local ground agent Fraport Cargo Services GmbH is responsible for handling the goods that are flown in and out by ABC's jumbo freighters. Meanwhile, Indian newcomer Flyington Freighters is stripped by a heavy loss of top executives.
     Besides Strodel, the VPs of maintenance and engineering, global marketing and operations have quit and left the Hyderabad-based enterprise.
     Since Flyington Freighters’ owner Deccan Holding's support for getting the company on its feet has increasingly slowed down due to high fuel prices and uncertain profits, aviation experts doubt that the south Indian carrier will ever take off.
Heiner Siegmund

Must To Avoid

     Here is one that some people would probably rather miss.
     But things being what they are, probably no one would admit the reason.
     Dr. Alfred E. Kahn will be the keynote speaker at the 2008 ACI World/North America Conference and Exhibition in Boston on September 22.
     As chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board, Kahn led the movement to deregulate U.S. airlines in 1978.
     Before that the airline game in America was the closest thing this industry will ever again see to having a permit to print their own money.
     Airlines were predictable and full service, and airplanes like the L1011 served canapés and showed movies all the way to wherever you wanted to fly and the coach area had seven lavs lined up like soldiers to serve passengers.
     So you gotta wonder:
     Do we ever need to hear from this guy again?
     President Jimmy Carter was bad enough.
     Spare us from the man who killed CAB and Mohawk and TWA and Eastern and Piedmont and Pan Am and . . . add your favorite airline here.

CO Keeping Its Cool

     “This accreditation tells our customers around the world that CO’s ClimateSecure products offer the highest handling quality available in the industry,” says Mark Mohr, Continental Cargo’s Manager of Product Development and Specialty Sales.
     Usually when awards and recognitions and accreditations hit the news in air cargo, an immediate question arises as to their veracity.
     The “so what” attitude has not been helped much by an almost non-stop string of honorariums bestowed almost willy-nilly at trade shows and elsewhere by trade publications and others.
     So Continental Airlines Cargo says it has been awarded status as a “Qualified Envirotainer Provider”(QEP) and that is supposed to mean something?
Well, actually, yes is the answer.
     “Accreditation under QEP is formal recognition that Continental Airlines employs industry-recognized best practices when managing shipments using Envirotainer’s temperature-controlled air cargo containers as part of a program that Envirotainer launched in 2006 after consultation with leading healthcare companies that wanted to define those service providers most capable of ensuring the integrity of their temperature-sensitive shipments,” Mark Mohr says.
     Envirotainer says that so far it has audited and accredited Continental Airlines’ stations in Houston, Newark and San Francisco.
     “We will roll-out the QEP program at other major global stations, including Buenos Aires, Amsterdam, Tokyo-Narita, London, Milan and Sao Paulo,” Mark Mohr said.

Fraport now holding a 24.5% share in Xi'an Xianyang International Airport Co., Ltd., said it will expand and is currently negotiating other projects in China . . . Abu Dhabi Airport handled 31,954 tons of cargo in July, an increase of 15.1 percent . . . Finnair said August cargo traffic was up 17% to Asia, down 14.1 percent to Europe, down 14.3 to North America. Cargo charter traffic decreased by 39.7 percent . . . That Boeing strike called by IAM idling 27,000 workers is now for real, but with balance of trade issues at stake, don’t look for the conflict to continue very long. Seen by more than a few observers as a predictable event, as in “every once in a while we go on strike,” one report has some striking workers out hunting in the Washington State woods or shopping in the malls . . .