FedEx, UPS Play Catch-Up as Volcano Causes Delays

This story appears in the April 26 print edition of Transport Topics.

FedEx Corp. and UPS Inc. again have access to their European hub airports after spending nearly a week of enduring flight cancellations and seeking ground-based transportation alternatives after a volcano in Iceland began spewing hot ash into the skies over the continent, closing airports and stilling the movement of air freight.

UPS got full access to its Cologne, Germany, air hub on the morning of April 21, a company spokesman confirmed, while FedEx got back to its hub at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport on the night of April 19.

The volcano under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in south-central Iceland began erupting on April 14. The ash plume contained an abundance of once molten rock that cooled quickly into tiny bits of glass — a potentially ruinous combination for jet aircraft and their engines. Winds carried the ash south and east toward Europe, and airports started closing the next day.

For packages and other freight already in Europe, both U.S.-based carriers said they mainly used trucks rather than railroads for transportation around the continent.

UPS was able to get some flights into Madrid, Spain, and Istanbul, Turkey, as early as April 19. It then sent express shipments by truck for delivery to continental Europe, Bloomberg News reported.

The Madrid flights carried goods from the United States, while the Dubai-to-Istanbul flight brought items from Asia, said Norman Black, a UPS spokesman.

“The disruption to air traffic most like this would have been 9/11,” said FedEx spokeswoman Sally Davenport. “It’s been a significant event because of the density of the population and the intercontinental flight lanes.”

About 100 FedEx flights involving Europe were canceled or diverted April 16-18, Davenport said. While Europe-North American routes were most affected, flights between Europe and the Middle East were also an issue, she said.

“We’re clearing out the backlog now,” UPS spokesman Black said April 21, adding that most major European airports had reopened by then and that freighter aircraft were getting their usual early morning slots.

“Most passenger airlines don’t want to fly at 2 a.m.,” Black said, though he declined to offer the number of UPS flights that had been affected. He also said passenger airlines bore the brunt of the problem because there are generally many more passenger flights than cargo flights. UPS normally handles about 2 million international shipments per day.

UPS and FedEx said volcanic eruptions are uncontrollable acts of nature that nullify normal money-back guarantee offers for time-sensitive shipments. Both companies employ their own teams of meteorologists to deal with contingency planning.

They mentioned the March 2009 eruption of Mount Redoubt in south-central Alaska as the most recent volcanic eruption before this, but Davenport said pilots could deal with that by simply adjusting their flight paths to a more southerly direction.

UPS spokeswoman Susan Rosenberg said the company’s meteorologists talked to the Volcanic Ash Advisory Center in Anchorage, Alaska, that is part of the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Cargo types that were been especially susceptible to the air traffic disruption included fresh food, flowers, pharmaceuticals and other medical supplies, and strategic electronic components for manufacturing plants.

The volcano also had a ripple effect on economies as far away as Asia. Five days into the crisis, a BMW plant in Germany and a Nissan plant in Japan were forced to close temporarily because the ash cloud prevented the arrival of parts shipments.

Prolonged disruptions to supply chains could have a profound effect on manufacturing and trade, potentially dimming Europe’s longer-term economic growth prospects, analysts said. In addition, struggling airlines were losing $200 million to $300 million a day.