AirOne outsources cargo to Lufthansa subsidiary

AirOne outsources cargo to Lufthansa subsidiary AirOne, a private Italian airline, has hired cargo counts GmbH to manage all its international cargo operations, the Lufthansa Cargo subsidiary said May 29.
   cargo counts offers total cargo management services to airlines whose core business is passenger transportation. Under the three-year agreement, the cargo specialist will handle sales, marketing, freight handling, information technology, capacity and price optimization, shipping documentation and other cargo functions to maximize the use of belly space in its fleet.
   The cooperative arrangement will commence on June 14 with the launch of long-haul service from Milan to Boston, and a few days later, to Chicago. AirOne will add two Airbus A330-200s, each of which can carry up to 18 tons of cargo, for the new intercontinental flights. It will serve Boston five times per week and Chicago six times per week.
   cargo counts faces a challenge convincing many tourist and low-cost airlines to pay more attention to cargo because those carriers are focused on getting planes turned for their next flight that they don’t want to bother with cargo.
   'An airline only commits to us if we can guarantee that their turnaround times are not disturbed,' Gabi Posniak, marketing manager for cargo counts, told American Shipper during the Cargo Network Services conference in Palm Beach, Fla., earlier this month.
   An aviation expert said one way to solve the tight ground windows is to eliminate handling cargo on both ends of flights. A plane could just carry a load one way without taking on cargo for a return flight, and vice versa between city pairs. That means that an airline with four frequencies per day, for example, could have cargo going in each direction on two flights.
   Existing customers of cargo counts are Condor, Croatia Airlines, Sun Express (Turkey), and euroAtlantic Airways (Portugal). ' Eric Kulisch