Markus Klaushofer, director of aviation marketing and business development at Vienna, is expecting 2008 to be another year of slower growth, but says things should pick up thereafter.
“We are in contact with at least one Middle Eastern and one Asian freighter carrier looking at sending their freighters to Vienna,” he insists. “There are no firm decisions yet, but services could start as early as the summer schedule.”
Success : Geography and Asian carriers Vienna’s geographical position has made it a natural consolidation point for Eastern Europe ever since the fall of the Iron Curtain, and its recent success has been built on Asian carriers such as Korean Air Cargo and Asiana flying freighters there to supply Korean electronics and automotive factories in neighbouring Slovakia and Hungary.
Korean still operates as many as 14 times a week to Vienna, with Asiana calling six times a week, and Emirates has a weekly B747-200F. But EVA Air pulled its twice weekly MD-11F service to the airport in October, apparently due to a temporary shortage of capacity. Klaushofer admits there is yet no indication of when the service might resume.
Forwarders continue to express confidence in Vienna as an Eastern European hub, however, many of the big names have either Eastern Europe or SouTheastern European headquarters there, and Kuehne + Nagel recently made Vienna the headquarters of its entire Eastern European and Russian business.
“That is a really big decision, because it means their entire business up to the Great Wall of China is now handled out of Vienna,” Klaushofer says, adding that it is easier to find skilled staff in Austria than in the Eastern European countries themselves.
Austrian Air’s list of woes
While Vienna remains confident about its Asian links, however, its home carrier, Austrian Airlines, has suffered a setback in this respect. A year ago, the carrier pulled out of passenger flights to such Asian destinations as Shanghai, Sydney, Melbourne and Kuala Lumpur, leaving only daily flights to Bangkok, Beijing, Tokyo, Delhi and Mumbai.
A new service to Chicago, launched in May, was some compensation to the cargo department for the loss of capacity, but the route cuts still led to a 12.6 per cent fall in volumes in 2007 to 150,335 tonnes. The cuts were particularly painful as they hit the lucrative Asia to Eastern Europe transit traffic the carrier specialised in, using its extensive belly cargo network to some 50 Eastern European and Russian cities.
The withdrawal of EVA Air also deprived Austrian of one of its two maindeck partners (the other being Emirates) and Franz Zöchbauer, executive vice president cargo for the carrier, admits that it has not yet found a replacement.
To complete the list of woes, the only freighter service Austrian operates in its own right – a five times a week AN-12 to Kiev – had to be cut to three times a week in December, due to aircraft problems, a situation Zöchbauer hopes is only temporary.’
But not all bad news
Having said that, Austrian Cargo has still managed to maintain its network of 18 road feeder services into Eastern Europe, and Zöchbauer can take some comfort from the fact that the carrier has plans to increase its Middle Eastern routes.
Destinations have not yet been announced, but Zöchbauer says some new services will begin in August, and will be operated by A320s with a useful 2-3 tonnes of cargo capacity.
Austrian is also restarting its pioneering A320 route to Erbil in northern Iraq on 2 April – initially three times a week, but rising to four times a week in June. The carrier was the first European operator into Iraq after the recent war, but suspended the service last August for security reasons.’
“This was a very good flight for cargo before it was stopped, because practically no one else was flying there,” says Zöchbauer. “Of course, it was only one way traffic, but yields were good, so we will be glad to see it return.”
