Getting Creative with Cargo: Alaska's transportation companies keep the cargo coming.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: TRANSPORTATION

For several days last spring, Anchorage Ted Stevens International Airport was the busiest airport in the world.

Those days are outliers, a result of global shutdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic, but they are an indication of the importance of cargo transportation in Alaska, according to Jim Szczesniak, airport manager.

"We are currently ranked number six in the world for cargo operations," Szczesniak said in October. About 2.8 million tons of cargo passes through the airport each year. This year, the coronavirus pandemic increased that number, he says.

For the second quarter in 2020, cargo was up 14.5 percent, or about 900 tons. In addition, Anchorage now serves more daily destinations using wide-body freighters than before the pandemic--about thirty-one markets, up from about twenty-one or twenty-two, Szczesniak says. The airport itself is responsible for one in ten jobs in the Anchorage area, with a $1.8 billion economic impact annually. in total it provides roughly 22,000 jobs throughout Alaska.

Szczesniak says the airport is looking to keep that growth going and has several projects coming online in the next two to three years. Those projects, as well as fleet upgrades and new technology for air, land, and sea shippers, are key to keeping the state's bustling cargo operations healthy and growing.

Air Cargo

Anchorage's location is crucial, as are the economics of cargo. Anchorage is roughly the same distance from New York City as it is from Tokyo, which puts the airport within a 9.5-hour flight from 90 percent of the industrialized world.

Passenger planes and cargo planes are essentially the same, Szczesniak says, but cargo weighs more.

"What they'll do is they will fill the plane to its maximum capacity with cargo, and that only allows them to fill the tanks about halfway with fuel," he says. "So they'll fly in from Asia to Anchorage, refuel, and from there they'll take it to North America, or vice versa. It allows them to maximize their revenue per flight by stopping here in Anchorage."

Most planes just refuel and continue to their destination, but because of legislation by former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, the airport is exempt from Jones Act cargo transfer restrictions. That means a foreign-based plane and an Americanbased plane can meet on the ramp in Anchorage and transfer cargo to increase efficiencies.

To date, almost all cargo that comes through Alaska originates from Outside, but a proposed $200 million, 700,000-square-foot cold storage facility may change that.

The Alaska Energy Authority is overseeing...