AirBridgeCargo Airlines (ABC) has established a new round-the-clock Control Tower (CT) operation to monitor consignments of special cargoes. CT will “proactively respond to service disruptions” to ensure the all-cargo carrier consistently meets customers’ delivery deadlines, claims the airline.

The operation will be managed by a team of fully-trained supply chain specialists and be based in Moscow. The CT provides real-time monitoring of all cargo movements throughout the entire transportation process across the airline’s international network, from booking to final customer delivery. The team is responsible for identifying and resolving any potential disruption to planned shipment deliveries that can result from a diverse range of circumstances. These include schedule disruption, documentation issues and the influence of bad weather conditions.

“Our new Control Tower is a ‘point of convergence’ which will accumulate all of our cargo movement data to consistently meet our service commitments and to take preventative or corrective actions as appropriate when they see a potential disruption developing. We have a highly experienced team of professionals managing the Control Tower who have the capabilities and skills to manage any challenges that can arise. This will be the foundation of our next step forwards in the arena of special cargoes, and is ultimately designed to provide benefits to final consumers, be it medicines or vaccines for their health and well-being, aircraft engines to resolve AOG situations and ensure passengers reach their destinations in good time, or the on-time delivery of cross-border ecommerce purchases for special occasions. ABC is committed to ensuring we can cater to the needs of our customers,” says Sergey Lazarev, general director of AirBridgeCargo Airlines.

The transportation of special cargo commodities has been at the forefront of ABC’s operations and growth throughout 2017, with special cargo volumes showing a 12 per cent growth year-on-year. The ABC Control Tower is reachable via telephone, Skype or e-mail and serves as a prime contact for niche product deliveries.

One of the team’s first troubleshooting operations was to find alternative capacity to maintain the delivery timescale of a special cargo shipment from Asia to Europe after bad weather conditions disrupted expected flight departures from the region.