FROM MAGAZINE: 'E-commerce is one of the significant opportunities for air cargo'

The 16th China Air Cargo Summit, held from Nov 12-14 in Hangzhou, deliberated on the trade slowdown, its impact on air cargo and most significantly, the opportunities e-commerce is creating for the industry. "Coming after just a couple of days after 11-11 (Singles Day in China), the figures show a 23-25 percent increase over the previous years demonstrates that e-commerce is one of the significant opportunities for air cargo. Not just for the next 2-20 years, but I think it will be a long-term significant trend in the way consumerism operates," said Glyn Hughes, global head of cargo, IATA during his address. Calling the industry to respond to the strategies of the e-commerce companies with agile and flexible solutions, Hughes further added, "Regardless of the strategies employed by the e-commerce companies, data is actually critical to enable those efficiencies." "There are two main challenges – technological and regulatory. The technological challenge is, without getting into details, small drones tend to use electric power, which means they rely on lithium batteries. The other disadvantage of lithium batteries is that they are very, very heavy. This severely restricts the range of operations. With small drones, you end up with a machine that weighs 20 kilogrammes and can carry one kilogramme. The economics are not very [good]. You have some companies implementing them, especially here in China. The adoption [of drones] hasn't been big because of that. When new technologies for batteries emerge and change that equation, it would dramatically change the landscape. About the other problem is regulation, and luckily we are seeing more and more regulators around the world, including here in China. They are proactive and create drone corridors, first for testing and eventually for licensing and operations. To this day there are no consistent cargo operations drones in the world. I see that changing in the next few years though," elaborated Rangelov.