newstodate.aero
Sep 05, 2019 (newstodate): Especially for airports with comparatively small volumes of air cargo, monthly statistics are highly sensitive to airlines' operational changes.
One case is Latvia's Riga Airport in 2019.
With a total of 13,313 tonnes of cargo handled during January-June 2019, Riga Airport saw its total cargo volumes down by 7.8 percent, y-o-y.
The H1/2019 decline was, however, basically reflecting the pull-out from April 19, 2018, of Turkish Cargo's two weekly freighter services at Riga Airport since July 1, 2017, so a more reliable picture of the actual performance of Riga Airport would emerge only from May 2019.
And in May and June 2019, Riga Airport did see growth returning, with y-o-y cargo volumes up by 11.6 and 11 percent, respectively.
The return of the underlying growth trend was however further boosted by the launch in May 2019 by Atran Airlines, member of the Volga-Dnepr Group, of a weekly freighter flight at Riga Airport, feeding via Moscow the Group's freighter service to Hangzhou, in China.
Atran Airlines is thus operating a Boeing 737-800BCF providing up to 23 tonnes of cargo capacity for e-commerce shipments of Cainiao Network, the logistics arm of Alibaba Group, to the European markets.
One case is Latvia's Riga Airport in 2019.
With a total of 13,313 tonnes of cargo handled during January-June 2019, Riga Airport saw its total cargo volumes down by 7.8 percent, y-o-y.
The H1/2019 decline was, however, basically reflecting the pull-out from April 19, 2018, of Turkish Cargo's two weekly freighter services at Riga Airport since July 1, 2017, so a more reliable picture of the actual performance of Riga Airport would emerge only from May 2019.
And in May and June 2019, Riga Airport did see growth returning, with y-o-y cargo volumes up by 11.6 and 11 percent, respectively.
The return of the underlying growth trend was however further boosted by the launch in May 2019 by Atran Airlines, member of the Volga-Dnepr Group, of a weekly freighter flight at Riga Airport, feeding via Moscow the Group's freighter service to Hangzhou, in China.
Atran Airlines is thus operating a Boeing 737-800BCF providing up to 23 tonnes of cargo capacity for e-commerce shipments of Cainiao Network, the logistics arm of Alibaba Group, to the European markets.