FRANKFURT,
Sept 26 (Reuters) - Milano de Flore, waiting dozily at Frankfurt
airport for a flight to Buenos Aires after competing in the London
Olympics, had no idea how important he is to the air freight business.
That
is because he is a horse - one of the many millions of live animals
whose transport by air has helped operators cushion the ups and downs of
the air cargo sector in the past few years with lucrative specialty
freight business.
"It's stayed relatively constant throughout the
crisis. There's hardly any volatility like with usual freight. People
just love animals," Axel Heitmann, head of Lufthansa Cargo's Animal
Lounge in Frankfurt, told Reuters.
And like other kinds of
speciality freight - such as pharmaceuticals that have to stay cold,
perishables like flowers or valuables like gold - animal cargo is more
profitable than general freight.
Larger animals in particular -
such as dolphins bound for a water park in Dubai, giant pandas on their
way to a new home in Paris or thoroughbred race horses - offer carriers
hefty margins.
Lufthansa Cargo, the freight arm of Germany's
leading airline Deutsche Lufthansa transports around 100 million live
animals per year, almost as many as the number of passengers served by
parent Lufthansa.
That number does however include 3,000 tonnes of worms to be used as fishing bait and a lot of tropical fish, Heitmann said.
ABSOLUTELY PROFITABLE
At
around 30 million euros ($39.4 million) in annual sales, Lufthansa
Cargo's live animal business is still small, compared to its overall
sales of 1.4 billion. But it's "absolutely a profitable business,"
Heitmann said.
Lufthansa invested at least 10 million euros in a
new 4,000 square metre animal facility, the Animal Lounge opened in
2008, when its old facilities reached capacity and it was having to turn
down business.
Lufthansa Cargo expects its animal business to
grow revenues by about 3-4 percent this year, Heitmann said. That
compares with a fall of 9.2 percent in volumes for Lufthansa Cargo's
overall business in the first six months of the year.
Animals have been transported by air since the early 1930s.
In
Germany, the demand for moving pets via planes was driven in the early
days by army personnel, who wanted to take their dachshunds back with
them to the United States.
Nowadays few airlines transport live
animals because there are very strict regulations on the facilities they
need to offer and how animals should be treated to keep them safe and
well.
GIRAFFES RISK HEART ATTACKS, RHINOS NEED SEDATION
Zoo
animals are often especially challenging because they may be especially
large, fragile or poisonous. Rhinoceroses, unsurprisingly, have to be
sedated throughout the flight.
"You don't want such a large animal lumbering about in flight," Lufthansa's Heitmann said.
And
giraffes are so sensitive and at such risk of heart attacks that they
have to gradually get used to rising noise levels on the plane before
taking off.
But the dangers of transporting animals are worth it for those cargo carriers that are willing to make the investment.
KLM
Cargo, part of Air France-KLM, which ships animals ranging "from
bumblebees to giraffes and from guppies to horses", says it has seen no
declines in demand for animal cargo in the crisis.
Industry-wide,
demand for overall air freight meanwhile declined by 2.8 percent in the
seven months through July this year, according to airline industry body
IATA.
Horses like the 12-year-old stallion Milano de Flore, who
placed 64th at the London Olympics, are a particular growth area for
cargo carriers. This is due to the popularity of events such as the
Spruce Meadows show-jumping in Canada and relatively new tournaments,
including the Dubai World Cup.
Data from the Federation Equestre
Internationale, the international body governing equestrian sport, shows
a marked rise in events over the last four years. Since 2008, the start
of the financial crisis, the number of annual events has jumped 34
percent.
"Given the growing popularity of equestrian sport
worldwide, we expect the number of FEI competitions at all levels to
continue growing," a spokeswoman for the federation said.
Cargolux,
a freight-only carrier that flies up to 3,000 horses a year, recently
invested in new horse containers that allow it to carry as many as 78
horses per flight on its Boeing 747-400 freighters, or 90 on the new
747-8F.
PRICE NO OBJECT?
Growth of animal cargo "is
not necessarily linked to economic factors," Hiran Perera, Senior Vice
President - Cargo Planning & Freighters at Dubai-based Emirates,
said.
Animals flown on cargo aircraft can be very valuable, and
owners are much more concerned with safety and reliability than with how
much the trip will cost.
Air freight is generally more popular
for transporting valuable goods such as gold or pharmaceuticals than
ships or trucks. Air cargo accounts for just over a third of goods
transported around the world by value but only about 0.5 percent of the
tonnage, according to data from IATA.
It can cost anywhere
between 5,000-8,000 euros to transport a horse from Europe to North
America, compared with around 800 euros for a medium-sized dog.
Unlike
pets such as cats and dogs, horses do not fit in the hold of regular
passenger planes, which are only 1.60 metres high, and so have to fly on
freight aircraft and require special containers that can fit up to
three horses side-by-side.
If no horses are booked for the return
trip, the container has to be flown back empty, which the cost of the
shipment needs to cover as well.
Emirates has been transporting
horses since 2001 and in April this year brought 70 of them from Oman to
Britain for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, a record number for the
company.
"Pet and horse transportation has increased. It's partly
because of the aircraft that we have and the fact that we've invested
in all of this. It's beginning to pay off," Perera said.
Perera
said Emirates has worked with aircraft maker Boeing to ensure the 777
freighter planes it was buying would be suitable for the shipment of
animals as well as other cargo.
Such planes may require, for instance, heating as well as seats for grooms that travel with the animals.
On
one of its 777s, Emirates flew thoroughbred horses from Sydney to
upstate New York in 2010 - its longest non-stop cargo flight ever at
17.5 hours - and says the horses may have been worth more than the
aircraft on which they were travelling.
A 777 Boeing freighter is
worth $280 million at list prices, while a thoroughbred racehorse can
cost hundreds of thousands or even tens of millions of dollars.
Story: http://www.reuters.com
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