FLUG REVUE April 2006: UPS expands in Cologne

April 2006

USP DOUBLES CAPACITY AT COLOGNE

By Sebastian Steinke
It is a winter's Monday evening in Cologne-Bonn airport, just after 10pm. Whereas the passenger terminal is slowly winding down apart from a few late charter flights, over in the cargo handling area below the control tower the busiest time of the day is just starting. The express cargo hub of American industry giant UPS, the ninth biggest airline in the world with a fleet comprising 269 aircraft of its own and a further 305 on charter, is just coming to life.

UPS Cologne

Parked close together with their noses sticking out into the yellowish floodlight in front of UPS's Cologne-Bonn air hub, the white and brown painted freighter planes – mostly Boeing 757-200F's and 767-300ERF's, Airbus A300F4-600R's and Boeing MD-11F's – “surround” the giant sorting halls on three sides. Here, every weekday evening the incoming express freight arriving from UPS's other bases around the globe and from the whole of Europe are gathered together, following into a matter-of-fact system that is geared towards maximum efficiency, sorted and distributed by air cargo or truck to the customers. On top of this there are global routes to Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Philippines. Every evening on the dot of nine o'clock a 767 takes off bound for Louisville, from where its European cargo will be delivered the very next morning (local time) in all the major cities of the USA and Mexico.

Because customers like to leave it as late as possible to hand over their express cargo yet want it delivered as early as possible, there is only a short time window between 11pm and 2:30am for the express cargo centre to sort and reload all its urgent goods into 500 containers to be carried on 31 scheduled express cargo nocturnal flights. And the cargo business is booming: in one unique record night shortly before Christmas 2005 no fewer than 220,000 shipments were handled in “CGN” – in the express cargo business one talks about items rather than tonnage. The time had come to expand.

So, on 30 January UPS took over the new $135 million Cargo Terminal West which had been under construction for two years. With 30,000 square metres of floorspace, this is the biggest terminal at Cologne-Bonn airport, surpassing even the new passenger terminal 2.

The huge, windowless, grey building is at least 20 metres high. Inside, it is virtually all given over to conveyor equipment. The labyrinthine array of conveyor belts extends a full 24 kilometres inside the building. Some of them even lead through multi-storey bridges into the older cargo terminals 4 to 7, which are still in use.

The tilt-tray sorting machine alone extends six kilometres. These conveyor belt segments consisting of tilting, suspended plates can shed their freight on either side of the line into special sorting chutes. All the time the freight, most of which consists of padded envelopes containing documents or small parcels, is protected against hard jolts or crashes. Many a maltreated passenger suitcase could have benefited from the same gentle treatment on the baggage-sorting equipment in passenger terminals. which is frequently a lot more brutal.

The express freight begins its fascinating journey through the maze of conveyors when it arrives by lorry at ground level on the land side or the far side of the terminal. Incoming air freight shipments, on the other hand, are taken over ramps into the raised ground floor on the apron side, still in their containers.

UPS differentiates three basic formats of shipment, which are handled in different ways. First there are the envelopes and small parcels, then come medium-sized parcels and finally large shipments and wooden crates. As well as size and weight, price is determined above all by the required speed of delivery, which can be by 9am, by 10:30am or by noon. The means of transport is determined by the permitted transit time. All small parcels which are allowed to take longer than one day within Europe are transported at lower cost in 150 trucks routinely employed on a daily basis.

Each full incoming air cargo container is driven by tow vehicle directly to an employee standing by a conveyor belt in Cargo Terminal West. All shipments are cursorily sorted by a human onto a conveyor belt with it's label pointing up for to the computer scanner. The scanner no longer reads using barcode and laser beam; instead it takes an electronic photo of the address field which is then digitally image processed. As if this were a ghost train, the otherwise dark conveyor belt section in front of the camera only briefly lights up in red when a new shipment is read in. After that the computer knows which way the cargo has to go. During their journey, the cargo items are continually redirected by electronically controlled steering rollers, as if by the hand of a ghost, for example, right over to the left or with the narrow side in front, following which they mingle collision-free with other conveyor flows before finally being extracted. Sometimes an item will move upwards, then down half a floor through a spiral chute before the it lands in the location of its destination, only to disappear immediately in the next air cargo container or into a lorry. Even the unloading sequence at the aircraft destination and the distribution of weight for on-board trimming are taken into account by the computer.

Dutiable goods start by travelling to the uppermost level into a separate customs warehouse for official checking on long packing stations. After that they resume their flow through the three-storey building. Through the metal grid on the floor of the three-storey building one can see the shipments disappear into the maze of shelves.

This ultra-modern equipment was developed in its entirety by Siemens, drawing on experience gained with a purely lorry transshipment station recently installed for UPS near Frankfurt. The trend is increasingly towards building several parallel conveyor routes. This means that if a malfunction should occur or maintenance is required, operations can continue over alternative routes. After all, punctual delivery of the cargo is the top priority. The machinery has a sorting capacity of 110,000 parcels per hour or over 30 parcels per second. This could later be upgraded to 165,000 parcels per hour.

“We are proud of the development,” said the state's Ministerpräsident Jürgen Rüttgers of on the occasion of the formal opening of Cargo Terminal West in Cologne. In North Rhine-Westphalia alone, he says, there are 1,000 logistics companies which between them employ 250,000 people. The aim is to turn this state into the “logistics location number one”. Germany can only be the biggest exporter in the world if it has fully functioning logistics. For this reason the regional government “will make sure that the legal conditions on which future development of the airport depends are put in place”. Here Rüttgers is alluding to the extension of night flight approval in Cologne which is expected in the medium term and is critical to express cargo traffic. Leipzig has just lured DHL away from the Rhine to central Germany with an undertaking to allow night flights for 30 years.

As airport director Michael Garvens points out, Cologne-Bonn airport has installed sound insulating windows and soundproof ventilation in 46,000 homes at a cost of Euro 85 million to protect local residents from night-time noise. UPS too is making efforts to avoid noise and, instead of using many small aircraft, it now deploys a few large jets which always use the least noise-sensitive approach and departure routes. On top of this, the fleet is to undergo a major modernisation programme which will also have a positive impact on emissions of noise and toxic substances. Whereas in the past the cargo planes used were often converted former passenger jets, for example, Boeing 727's fitted with hushkits for noise reduction, these days brand-new jets are increasingly used. Only on 13 December a contract for ten A380-800F's for delivery between 2009 and 2012 was signed. Boeing has also been involved: back in August last year the Atlanta-based company ordered eight new 747-400F's for delivery in 2007 and 2008.

The UPS pilots in Cologne, who include not only American citizens but numerous foreigners, are based at the global head hub in Louisville, Kentucky. They only come to the Rhine for individual rosters.

According to two First Officers who were chatting while the ceremony was going on, many of their colleagues from the big passenger airlines used to smile at their night cargo jobs in the cockpit. But these days they would frequently be asked to pass on letters of recommendation from outside pilots hoping for one of the now much sought after jobs at UPS. For the express cargo business is booming. This sector has been expanding steadily without any setbacks, and this is reflected in the attractive salaries paid to its pilots. According to UPS, an average First Officer was earning $175,000 per year as of the end of 2005 and a Captain as much as $223,000. The company is highly profitable, having achieved annual sales in 2005 of $42.6 billion (up 16.4 percent on the previous year), and in the fourth quarter alone its net profit was $1.05 billion.

Some of this wealth has trickled down onto Cologne: Wolfgang Flick, President of UPS Europe, recalls that the cargo giant originally started in 1986 with only 40 staff in Cologne, whereas today it offers 1,800 jobs here and in administration in the adjoining municipality of Troisdorf. Flick praises the proximity of Cologne to the business centres, the runway system which can even handle the A380, the pool of potential labour in the region and, last but not least, the weather. Every potential UPS location is subjected to extensive meteorological studies before the go-ahead can be given. Frequent mist or frost would be too disruptive to UPS's flight operations, which are always under a lot of time pressure.

From FLUG REVUE 4/2006

Last updated 10 March 2006

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