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G. Gurumurthy

Only around 30 per cent of the castings exported from Coimbatore gets through the Coimbatore air-cargo complex, with the remaining larger chunk of these shipments are moved by road to Chennai and of late to Kochi airports.

COIMBATORE, April 8

LIMITATIONS in booking high-density cargo and lack of cargo space in the domestic carriers linked to this city hinder the Coimbatore air-cargo complex realising full potential of export cargo throughput off Coimbatore airport.

The freight forwarders using the cargo complex are catered by the only two domestic carriers — Jet Airways and the Indian Airlines — whose pair of flights linking Coimbatore with Chennai and Mumbai respectively being essentially passenger flights are accepting the international export cargo bookings subject to their floor limitations.

This naturally brings the restriction on the forwarders in undertaking booking export consignment weighing beyond 150 kgs per single packing. "This floor limitation from the passenger carriers discourages booking of high density export cargo like castings manufactured by the export-based engineering units. Only around 30 per cent of the castings exported from Coimbatore gets through the Coimbatore air-cargo complex, with the remaining larger chunk of these shipments are moved by road to Chennai and of late to Kochi airports. To that extent, Coimbatore airport is losing on export cargo, says Mr Chandrasekhar, St. John Freight System, which handles engineering goods exports.

The fluctuations in the flow of the air-passenger traffic on a given day in the Coimbatore airport too affects the flow of export cargo volume to be handled at the cargo complex. More passenger traffic would mean a cut back in the cargo carrying capacity from these airlines.

This is often said to be contributing to unscheduled halt and detention of the export cargo, which may pose problem for the shippers/forwarders in meeting the re-shipment/transhipment schedules in other gateway airports.

The clearing and forwarding agencies here say that out of the estimated 500 to 600 tonnes of export cargo originating from Coimbatore region every month, hardly 10 per cent turns out to be the throughput for the Coimbatore airport. The bulk of the cargo is moved to Chennai, Bangalore and Kochi airports.

The absence of exclusive frighter aircraft operation off Coimbatore and the unpredictability of the available cargo space with the narrow-bodied passenger aircraft force the freight forwarding agencies relying heavily on trucking their cargo to the gateway ports.

Mr Prakash Sukumaran of Airlink India, Coimbatore says that his company could handle about 650 tonnes of export cargo in 2002-03 from Coimbatore and in this its share of throughput for Coimbatore airport stood around 200 tonnes only. The rest of the export cargo was moved to Chennai/Kochi.

The situation would be different had Coimbatore been served by a wide-bodied aircraft which would allow more leeway in carrying higher cargo-load for which the airport should have a widened/further lengthened run-way, he said.

Despite these hiccups, the air-cargo complex run by the airport authority of India (AAI) here has handled 913 tonnes of export cargo throughput for the year ended March 31, 2003. The Coimbatore cargo complex has achieved an all-time high export cargo handling of 140 tonnes in a single month in March 2003.

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