Operated by Atlas Air, the fully loaded 747-400F is scheduled to leave HKG on Sunday, Nov. 19, and arrive late the same evening, local time, at LAX. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a team on standby, ready to recover what is now 117 tonnes of chargeable weight off that airplane, to be broken down and delivered to customers on Monday,\u201d said Neel Jones Shah (pictured), senior vice president and global head of airfreight at Flexport,<\/span><\/p>\n

Since the Atlas widebody is carrying freight for a lot of <\/span>Flexport\u2019s \u201ckey customers,\u201d Shah said he is very excited to be running the forwarder\u2019s first charter. \u201cFor us, this is a momentous occasion,\u201d he said. \u201cChartering an airplane is no small commitment. We\u2019re 100 percent laser-focused on making sure our customer\u2019s supply chains are protected. With the backlogs that are occurring in Hong Kong right <\/span>now and the scarcity of capacity, we needed to do what was right for our customers in order to keep the supply chains moving.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Doing the right thing, comes at a price, of course. Shah, formerly chief cargo officer at Delta Airlines, said the going rate for the high-volume, trans-Pacific charter service is now in the US$5 to $7 per kilo range, especially after a wave of recent flight cancellations have taken place in Hong Kong, further tightening capacity.<\/span><\/p>\n

The cost of Sunday\u2019s charter flight will likely be more than $8 per kilo, meaning the full charge for the Atlas charter will be \u201cwell in excess of $800,000,\u201d Shah said. Most of the goods being shipped, however, are high-tech consumer electronics, nearly all of which have been ordered via e-commerce. \u201cOur customer base right now is very heavily concentrated with shippers that produce consumer goods.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Freighters and charter services are going to be \u201ca core part\u201d of <\/span>Flexport\u2019s strategy in 2018, Shah said, which can \u201copen up a new revenue stream for the company.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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This weekend\u2019s charter arrangement came together quickly, Shah said, but Flexport may decide to charter another trans-Pacific freighter with Atlas next week. \u201cThe next one will be easier,\u201d he added. \u201cFrom a team perspective, there\u2019s nothing like on-the-job training.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Boeing, Atlas It\u2019s been only two and a half years since Flexport began operations as an online forwarder, but they have already reached a major milestone by chartering a 747 freighter flight from Hong Kong (HKG) to Los Angeles (LAX). Since we are in mid-November, Flexport is also getting a taste of life for forwarders…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6831,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,3,47],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6829"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6829"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6838,"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6829\/revisions\/6838"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}