Cathay Pacific selects new chief operating officer

   Rupert Hogg has been selected as the new chief operating officer of Cathay Pacific Airways and will take up the position from Ivan Chu in March.
   Hogg will also become a director of the airline. Chu has been promoted to the airline’s chief executive position, a move that was announced in August. The current chief executive, John Slosar, will become chairman of Cathay Pacific, succeeding Christopher Pratt.
   Hogg worked as director of cargo for Cathay from 2008 to 2010 and most recently served as director of sales and marketing.
   The airline has recently been seeing an increase in airfreight activity due to late peak-season traffic out of Asia fueled by new product releases. A portion of this activity has been artificially created by the tightening of capacity that came when Asian airlines reduced routings and took planes out of the sky during periods of low traffic. During October, Cathay Pacific and its subsidiary, Dragonair, saw a 0.9-percent drop in cargo, year over year, finishing the month with 137,300 tons. The load factor fell by 2.4 points due to a capacity rise of 4 percent, when compared with October 2012. During the 10 months of 2012, cargo activity is down by 1.8 percent for Cathay, and capacity is up by 0.9 percent.
   “The expected airfreight peak was late in arriving, but by the end of October, we had begun to see a significant climb in the tonnages being shipped out of the key manufacturing centres in Mainland China and Asia, driven by consumer IT products,” Cathay’s Mark Sutch said in a statement. “We began to ramp up freighter capacity on the North American lanes and mounted a number of extra sectors and charters, but demand to and from Europe remained softer than hoped. Capacity was boosted by the addition of our latest freighter destination, Guadalajara, on 19 October.”