Alaska's International Airport: Serving Europe, Asia, and North America, Anchorage airport plays vital role in air cargo business.

AuthorWolf, Greg
PositionInternational Trade

Geography can be either a blessing or a curse. In the case of the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, it is very much a blessing. Poised nearly equidistant between Europe, Asia, and North America, the airport plays a vital role in the global air cargo business. The state-owned airport is located within 9.5 hours of 90 percent of the industrialized world and serves as the primary link for carriers operating trans-Pacific flights between cities in Asia and North America. It is estimated that approximately 80 percent of all cargo flights operating across the Pacific make a "technical stop" at Anchorage to refuel, change crews, and (in some cases) to transfer cargo. This strategic location led both FedEx and UPS to locate hubs at the airport to support their extensive international operations. The airport continues to be one of the busiest in the world for cargo carriers. It currently ranks as the fourth largest cargo airport in the world and second largest in the United States. Internationally, it ranks only behind Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Incheon (South Korea). Domestically, only Memphis, home to FedEx's major hub, sees more cargo traffic. Each week, the airport handles nearly 500 landings of wide-bodied cargo freighters. The primary advantage for the cargo carriers to make stops at Anchorage is that they can maximize their payload to fuel ratio. In other words, by being able to carry more cargo and less fuel, they can operate with more efficiency and greater profitably. A carrier is able to transport an additional 100,000 pounds of revenue cargo by making a fuel stop in Anchorage. It's a simple, but powerful, incentive to make use of the Anchorage stopover. Another advantage is Anchorage's unique cargo transfer authorities granted to it by the US Department of Transportation. These expanded cargo transfer rights make Anchorage extremely flexible for cargo airlines to make use of time on the ground refueling to also carry out transfers between their own planes and those of other carriers.

These transfers rights include "on-line" transfers between a carrier's own aircraft; "inter-line" transfers between one carrier and another carrier; "co-mingling" of US and non-US cargo; and "change-of-gauge" transfers from, for example, a wide-bodied freighter aircraft to one or more smaller aircraft flying to multiple destinations from Anchorage.

One of the growth engines for cargo activity at the airport is the ongoing expansion of trade between...

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