Air India CMD Rohit Nandan and CEOs from Star Alliance member airlines at the unveiling of the Air India plane with the Star Alliance livery at Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport.

Air India’s Maharaja finally found his place in Star Alliance on July 11.
     The membership has experienced some hiccups on its four-year journey.
     Now, the onus will be on Air India to prove to the world that it is indeed a star—not only in providing facilities to passengers, but also giving a leg up to cargo.
     Armed with the Star membership, Air India is looking forward to reviving its fortunes. The carrier had an operating loss of $351 million and a net loss of $652 million in the financial year that ended on March 31, 2014. But the good news from the airline is that it will be able to bring down its operating losses by more than 42 percent in 2014-15, thanks largely to the Star Alliance membership, which will see more passengers and higher cargo volumes.

Cargo Belly Up

     Air India Cargo, the cargo subsidiary of Air India set up in 1954, stopped operations quite some time ago, but continues to manage belly cargo of Air India’s passenger fleet.
     Air India did away with its dedicated cargo freighters.
     Two years ago, Air India wrapped up its cargo business and sold its six B737-200 freighters.
     These planes belonged to Indian Airlines (or Indian, which is now merged with Air India) and had been converted to freighters when plans were drawn up to start cargo operations from the Nagpur hub.
     Later, in the face of worldwide recessionary trends, the plans were disbanded.
     Around that time, Air India officials said that the sale of the freighters was due to the fact that they were “too big for domestic operations and too small for international operations.”


Woe Is We

     To add to Air India’s woes, the airline lacked “a critical distribution network, warehousing facilities, mismanagement, and inadequate infrastructure that had driven away business from Air India's cargo division,” according to officials.
     Over the last couple of years, however, the carrier has been seeing “good business” in cargo.
     According to sources in Air India, in the last two financial years (2012-13 and 2013-14), the carrier had cargo revenues totaling $140 million and $155 million, respectively.

Tonnage Up

     In tonnage terms, 158,220 tons were carried in FY 2013 in comparison to 137,000 tons in FY 2012.      In April-December 2013, for example, Air India carried 131,055 tons compared with the 102,013 tons it carried during the same period of the previous year.
     Airline officials maintained that the ratio of international and domestic cargo was 70:30. While international cargo was seeing an upward movement on routes to Europe (London, Paris, and Frankfurt), domestic cargo, too, was witnessing growth.
     The other international markets where Air India’s cargo was doing well were the Far East and the Gulf. Officials maintained that the cargo division was concentrating on the US market.


Star Of India

     With the Star membership, Air India has added a total of 400 daily flights and more than 40 new destinations in India to the Alliance network.
     The Maharaja carries cargo on all these routes and the management is keen to project Air India’s ‘star’ quality that officials believe will help cargo bring in 30 percent more revenue in financial year 2014-15.
     It is no wonder that Star Alliance’s CEO Mark Schwab pointed out to FlyingTypers that this (present) Air India is “a different Air India” where the management was tough, had adjusted well to the merger (of Air India and Indian Airlines) and had improved the fleet and services.
     “All these qualities will take Air India to a level where it would be able to provide consistently top quality services on the ground and in the air and that would also include cargo.”
     As Air India’s Commercial Director Pankaj Srivastava pointed out:
     “We were benchmarked against one of the world’s top carriers and that kind of benchmarking is done periodically by Online Customer Service Surveys (OCSS).” The survey clearly projected AI as being inadequate—that is now being diligently followed across all departments of the airline.

More Good Words

     As Chairman and Managing Director Rohit Nandan put it:
     “This [the Star Alliance membership] is the opportunity and everybody in Air India now realizes that there are not too many opportunities left and if we do not take these opportunities seriously, then I think we are missing the bus.
     “And I am very happy that the employees have been reacting in a very positive way.”
Tirthankar Ghosh

Flag Waving . . . Emirates first officer revives the “taxiing flag” tradition popular during the 1930s from the right seat cockpit window of a Boeing 777-200LR, as the airline celebrates its inaugural flight into Chicago O'Hare International Airport, Tuesday, August 5, 2014.
     Among all the USA city flags, the Chicago flag is one of the most significant, for several reasons.
     The three white stripes represent the North, West, and South sides.
     The top blue stripe represents Lake Michigan and the North Branch of the Chicago River.
     The bottom blue stripe represents the South Branch of the river and the canal.
     The four six-pointed red stars represent major historical events: Fort Dearborn, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, and the Century of Progress Exposition of 1933-34.
     The taxiing flag is the perfect touch, as new daily service begins between the “City of the Big Shoulders,” as Carl Sandburg once described Chicago, via Emirates to beautiful Dubai.

     This picture of a groundbreaking full page ad in Sunday’s The New York Times was taken in New York City’s Grand Central Station. The ad is selling the services of a website that claims to know everything about marijuana.
     “The newspaper of record” was essentially endorsing—with ad space—the United States gradual acceptance towards wider usage of cannabis. A new era seems either just around the corner, somewhere down the road, or in the air everywhere.
     For the newspaper business, selling various brands of pot would be a windfall for advertising.
     Newspapers have never recovered the loss of revenue gained from selling cigarettes, so perhaps offering marijuana would reinvigorate business enough to slow the non-stop wind-down as the print era moves inexorably to digital.
     For air cargo, legalizing pot might bring some new air speed demand to move “The American Brands” quickly around the world: sales in all 50 states would raise demand for Duty Free Shops, and cargo platforms might need to ship the product to countries where pot is legal, like Holland.
     No doubt, as Bob Dylan wrote, “The Times Are A Changing” but who would have thunk it—in 2014.
     The New York Times is advocating marijuana legalization and running ads that heretofore had only appeared in underground publications.
     We just can’t wait to attend The CNS Partnership Conference or the Air Forwarders or Air Cargo Americas after marijuana is legalized. Let’s see if the conversation speeds up or slows down during the coffee breaks, or even if there will be coffee breaks at all.
     And how much better would all those rubber chicken banquets at IATA World Cargo Symposium be after a cocktail hour with a choice of wine, beer or joint?
     Maybe CNS will offer “Marijuana Breaks” with coffee and “Alice B. Toklas brownies.”
     We wonder how much sponsorships will cost then…
     High Times, indeed!

     As the cannabis issue in the United States works itself out, we share a family memory of when our son Geoffrey II took a small part in the movie Super Troopers.
     It may have seemed a small part at the time, but Geoffrey got his big break in show business when that movie became a cult classic, especially for the opening nine-minute segment in which he appeared.
     Geoffrey is in the back seat of a car wearing an Air Cargo News t-shirt and the rest, as they say, is history.
     Now more than a decade later, after attending RADA, performing with Meryl Streep in the New Shakespeare Summer Festival’s production of Mother Courage in Central Park, and starring in a couple of TV series and a half dozen films, Geoffrey’s nine-minute bit remains a touchstone. When out on the streets of NYC, he still hears the occasional “Hey, SHNOZZBERRIES!”--- when he is recognized.
     But, that is show biz.
     We can remember he was still working as a waiter in a pizzeria when this scene was shot.
     After he shot the scene he went back to waiting tables, but refused to take oregano with his pizza as he had vowed after this scene that oregano was out of his diet forever.
     Watch the scene and you will know why.
     And the t-shirt?
     We may just print some more of them sometime.
Geoffrey/Flosssie

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