Delivery services increasing cargo operations at airport

While JetBlue Airways made headlines this week when it announced it would start passenger service from Tucson to New York this fall, United Parcel Service and other freight handlers have been quietly expanding their local operations as well.

UPS's "brown tail" 757 aircraft began landing and taking off four times a week in early June as part of the company's expanding air-freight network, said UPS spokesman Stephen Boggs.

And since last fall, FedEx Corp. has gone from flying two 727s into Tucson to a 727 and a larger Airbus 319 aircraft, while DHL Worldwide Express now flies in two DC-9 aircraft instead of one, said Jim Garcia, senior director of business development for the Tucson Airport Authority.

Were it not for escalating fuel costs, cargo business at Tucson's airport would probably be undergoing even more expansion than it's already seen, Garcia said.

"It's fair to say that right now, the situation is they're all busting out at the seams and need additional space, but the cargo carriers get impacted just like the passenger carriers in terms of fuel," Garcia said. "But there is definitely some momentum and some opportunities for growth, and what UPS has done is one more nugget to increase capacity."

The airport would like to eventually add an additional 28,000-square-foot cargo facility to handle the increased cargo business here, he said.

Year-to-date figures from the airport authority show 32,061,912 pounds of cargo had been handled through May, 6.8 percent more than the same period last year.

UPS has had a service center at the airport, but added an "air gateway" last month, as part of its December 2004 purchase of Menlo Worldwide Forwarding Inc.

Menlo had contracted with Miami-based Cargo Force Inc. to move its freight at Tucson's airport, but all 18 of Cargo Force's workers are now loading and unloading the UPS brown tail, Boggs said.

Cargo Force primarily ships larger, heavier cargo than what people might think of when it comes to UPS, much of it to the Ford Motor Co.'s plant in Hermosillo, Sonora. But UPS's decision to add a gateway in Tucson gave it the opportunity to also begin handling smaller packages that the company had trucked to Phoenix, said Jimmy Membrila, manager of Cargo Force's Tucson operations.

"We're doing a lot more now with UPS than we had been with Menlo, and most of the increase is because UPS is incorporating their smaller packages in with the service, and they had never done that here before," Membrila said.

Boggs said UPS does not disclose the volume of freight it moves, but sees opportunities for expanding in Tucson.

"UPS air freight is happy to be in Tucson," he said. "It's a bonus to us and our customers."

● Year-to-date activity at Tucson International Airport

Passengers 1,864,590 1,757,500 +6.09%

Air carrier freight* (lbs.) 1,639,139 1,648,079 -0.54%

Air cargo freight (lbs.) 32,061,912 30,022,071 +6.79%

*Freight carried by passenger airlines

Source: Tucson Airport Authority data from Jan. 1 through May