The hair-pulling reality of air cargo strategy is that there is rarely a clear-cut answer that guarantees success.
But that's also what makes this industry so fascinating. It's about much more than feeding data into a spreadsheet and waiting for the answer to appear.
This week at the
Air Cargo & Logistics Development (China) Forum, we discussed one of those questions with no simple answer.
Is the best cargo airport always a dedicated cargo airport? Or do carriers prefer full-service hubs, where freighters, passenger routes and belly capacity work together?
There is not only one right answer and many wrong ones.
But what matters is flexibility, predictability and an airport that understands what the customer actually needs.
Infrastructure should serve the cargo flow, not the other way around.
For Avinor, that means building on what already makes us competitive.
Around 650 tonnes of Norwegian seafood are flown to Asia and North America every day. These stable, high-value volumes support cargo operations, but they also make new long-haul passenger routes more viable. Cargo is not a by-product of airport operations. It is part of the business case for better connectivity.
At Oslo Airport we are preparing for what comes next.
With Cargo Vest, our ambition is to develop a purpose-built cargo hub that increases capacity, strengthens our cold-chain advantage and gives airlines, freight forwarders and exporters more predictability.
At the same time, moving cargo to the western part of the airport (hence the name as West is Vest in Norwegian) frees up capacity close to the passenger terminal and allows us to make better use of the airport infrastructure we already have.
While e-commerce volumes into Europe may have taken a hit from new EU regulation, the long-term direction is clear: air cargo will continue to grow, and the winners will be the airports that stay flexible enough to serve different carriers, cargo types and business models.
We want to be that airport!