Air Freight awl the Road Carrier
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HAVING made a whirlwind three-week tour of North America in true political " whistle-stop" style, I found myself in possession of a vast collection of transport miscellany. There, amongst the 20 lb. of documents I had collected, was the material for the main articles which I had set out to write; they will be appearing in The Commercial Motor from time to time this year. But, in addition, I had this mass of impressions which seemed well worth passing on.
The only way to do this was to start at the beginning and talk my way through to the end. This is what I propose to do in a series of short articles. This is the first.
I must explain that all I could hope to do in a tour of this kind was to dip haphazardly into certain aspects of American and Canadian goods transport. I spoke to operators of big fleets and small, to forwarding agents, to manufacturers, Government officials, drivers, salesmen—anyone who would talk to me, I deliberately set out only to look at goods transport. There have been several excellent Institute of Transport scholars' reports on passenger transport; I could not hope to emulate their detailed researches, so I stuck to goods vehicles. I must also explain that, again deliberately, confined my tour to the East coast. Road transport on the Western side of North America is a totally different picture; so anything I say in this series must be taken to refer only to the eastern seaboard.
Undercutting by Air My tour started in New York. It began, appropriately enough, with something still (so far as United Kingdom hauliers are concerned) largely of the future---air freight. In the U.S.A. air freight, on the coast-to-coast hauls, is even undercutting road and rail rates for some traffics.
I went to the Emery Air Freight Corporation, they being probably the largest forwarder of air freight in the world, and certainly in the United States. My contact was a dark, dapper young man, Edward J. Feeney, in charge of research and development.
Quiet, efficient and knowledgeable, Edward Feeney painted a picture for me that I found fascinating. In retrospect, it left me wondering whether, with Europe opening out as a transport market for Britain (and so offering the long distances necessary for economic air hauls) there is not, in fact, something here for British goods vehicle operators to consider. One thing is certain: every load of air freight must be collected and delivered by road.
There are 80 concerns in the U.S.A. whose sole occupation is with air freight forwarding; they are not carriers, although they do run a number of collection and delivery vehicles themselves where they cannot get local hauliers to do the work, or where customers will not collect in their own vehicles. Emery takes approximately one-third of all the air freight business in America.
Feeding the Terminals The most obvious problem with air freight, as with all air travel, is the journeys to and from the terminals. It has been this, as much as any, problem that has been exercising Emery's corporate mind for a long time. Containers, it would seem, are the best answer. (To digress for a moment, I must remark that I found very mixed feelings about containers among American and Canadian truckers, but more about that in future articles.) By using containers and four-jet allcargo planes, Edward Feeney told me, a city depot-to-depot service between New York and Los Angeles has been set up which takes just 51 hours. The use of containers enables Emery to by-pass the two air terminals, where the average transhipment time is two hours at each end. The real measure of this speed is in the comparison of how long a road vehicle needs to complete the 2,500-mile journey; it is away on the round trip for a week, and that is with two drivers in a sleeper cab. A big jet plane, incidentally, carries a larger payload than the average American road unit.
Small wonder that road freight rates are outbid on this sort of work, or that there is not nearly so much trans-Continental road travel as one would imagine!
There are, according to Mr. Feeney, about 60 air terminals that can be used in the United States, so far as economic air freight haulage is concerned, Therefore, there arose a rapid (and still pressing) demand for good surface distribution within about 100-120 miles from each centre. Customers insisted on—and now have—a 24-hour delivery anywhere in the U.S.A.—from Emery, at least.
Initially, Emery found that truckers' schedules were not geared to the airlines' needs, The trucker did not always want to deliver straight from the airport; he wanted to go back to his depot and tranship the load.. So Emery began a system of subsidies; they guaranteed a minimum revenue for three months, in exchange for direct collection and delivery.
There is on the whole, I found, a guarded relationship between road carriers and air carriers—brought about largely by this speed requirement of the air carrier between his terminals and collection and delivery points. Several times in my travels I was to hear of this from truckers who seemed willing to expand their revenues by working with air carriers but who have found, in practice, that the expected revenue for collection and delivery was not always there. (A costing problem of which, of course, road transport is not altogether unaware.)
Not Much Profit Sitting listening to Mr. Feeney, and with my instinctive sympathies towards the road operator, I was able to see both sides of this picture. Another problem Emery had, he told me, was where a trucker was collecting from a number of airlines and forwarding agents within the same airport. This, from Emery's point of view, took too much time. So they learned to encourage truckers by offering full loads, and even delivering to the truckers' depots to save time.
Since talking to Edward Feeney, in the hindsight of future experience of the tour, it has occurred to me that perhaps the air freight forwarders (the vast majority of whom are neither so substantial nor so forward-thinking as Emery). were trying to get too much for too little from the truckers. If they offered higher rates, they might encourage a better service. If they gave truckers all the traffic and did not keep the cream for their own road services, relations might be happier. But that is only a general observation; I cannot back it with figures.
However, as circumstantial evidence I offer this: "Most airlines don't make much money at air freight yet" (Edward Feeney). I suppose that, if their own rates are critical, their subcontractors' rates will be too.
Many airlines, I was told, carry freight in passenger aircraft, averaging 200 lb. a load. But there are a number of lucrative all-freight air lines. Now, there is the advent of the four-jet all-cargo planes. These I think—so does Edward Feeney and everyone else I spoke to— will eventually achieve the. breakthrough.
(Next week: more about air freight, and an interview with top truck designers.)