THE transport of cargo was a significant driver of Latin American passenger carriers' success in maintaining their operations during the Covid crisis, making air freight Latin America's only Covid crisis aviation winner, reports London's Flightglobal.
Cargo transportation went without government financial aid while transporting essential freight to fight the Covid crisis.
The airlines see the market only growing in the future.
Meanwhile, Latin American carriers like LATAM have invested heavily in their air freight operations.
During the Covid crisis lockdowns and travel restrictions in 2020 and 2021, customers in Latin America increasingly turned to order goods online.
As that demand grew, so did the need for timely delivery of those packages.
Passenger carriers like Azul, LATAM, and Avianca stepped into the void to satisfy that need.
'Cargo is an instrumental part of what we do. I always say that at Azul every single one of our 13,000 crewmembers works for our cargo department,' said Azul CEO John Rodgerson.
'There's a logistics problem in Latin America and this was a business that was going to grow anyway. It just accelerated through Covid.' said Mr Rodgerson.
Azul is now delivering 20,000 packages every day and can send them to over 1,000 cities from Brazil within two days.
LATAM Cargo CEO Andres Bianchi declared that the global disruption caused by the Covid crisis is anything but an opportunity.
'The fact that we were very active, moving vaccines and doing disaster relief, enabled different conversations with the governments, and I think that's a first step in generating a new operating environment,' said Mr Bianchi.
'These things are too backwards. We want to take this industry to the next level and we need that efficiency, we need to be competitive,' said Mr Bianchi.
'Those are the types of discussions that we need to have.' said Mr Bianchi.
SeaNews Turkey
Cargo transportation went without government financial aid while transporting essential freight to fight the Covid crisis.
The airlines see the market only growing in the future.
Meanwhile, Latin American carriers like LATAM have invested heavily in their air freight operations.
During the Covid crisis lockdowns and travel restrictions in 2020 and 2021, customers in Latin America increasingly turned to order goods online.
As that demand grew, so did the need for timely delivery of those packages.
Passenger carriers like Azul, LATAM, and Avianca stepped into the void to satisfy that need.
'Cargo is an instrumental part of what we do. I always say that at Azul every single one of our 13,000 crewmembers works for our cargo department,' said Azul CEO John Rodgerson.
'There's a logistics problem in Latin America and this was a business that was going to grow anyway. It just accelerated through Covid.' said Mr Rodgerson.
Azul is now delivering 20,000 packages every day and can send them to over 1,000 cities from Brazil within two days.
LATAM Cargo CEO Andres Bianchi declared that the global disruption caused by the Covid crisis is anything but an opportunity.
'The fact that we were very active, moving vaccines and doing disaster relief, enabled different conversations with the governments, and I think that's a first step in generating a new operating environment,' said Mr Bianchi.
'These things are too backwards. We want to take this industry to the next level and we need that efficiency, we need to be competitive,' said Mr Bianchi.
'Those are the types of discussions that we need to have.' said Mr Bianchi.
SeaNews Turkey