For airports in Southern Europe, this positioning offers unique advantages, namely for alternate lanes connecting Europe with Northern Africa and the broader Mediterranean space.
Marseille Provence Airport serves as an critical gateway for narrate cargo between Southern France, Corsica, and Northern Africa. With day-to-day connections to critical hubs like Brussels, Leipzig, Cologne, and Paris CDG, the airport supports a sturdy network that caters to the narrate shipping requires of the distance.
Necessary narrate operators reminiscent of French Put up, DHL, UPS, and FedEx catch chosen Marseille Provence Airport as a critical node in their network, leveraging the airport’s connectivity and strategic jam.
“From January to the tip of September 2024, we dealt with around 40,000 tonnes of narrate cargo,” Jean-Marc Boutigny, Cargo Supervisor at Marseille Airport, remarked.
Advantages of Marseille’s jam
Marseille’s strategic contrivance makes it an supreme hub for airfreight operations. The airport is with ease situated midway between Northern Spain and Northern Italy, taking into yarn efficient connections to both regions to boot to to Corsica, Algeria, and Tunisia.
“Marseille advantages from the actual jam in Southern Europe,” Boutigny critical.
The airport’s connectivity with Northern Africa is namely stable, with Air Algérie linking Marseille to 14 cities in Algeria. This contains a devoted freighter provider to Hassi Messaoud, an necessary route for transporting drilling equipment to Algeria’s oil and gas industries.
This geographic revenue additionally interprets into operational efficiencies. Shorter flight instances between Marseille and Northern Africa scale back gasoline consumption, plane depreciation, and overflight charges.
“These three components mixed cessation in a 40 to forty five p.c reduction in operation expenses on air cargo routes,” he continued.
“Every cargo operator advantages from a warehouse merely in entrance of its freighters.
“Our motto is to continuously set apart time on the ramp handling operations thanks to shortest distances between freighters and warehouse.”
Willing for improve
Among the numerous forms of cargo processed at Marseille Provence, perishable items are experiencing a critical improve. Contemporary organic vegetables and fruit from East African countries like Ethiopia, Kenya, and Rwanda approach on Ethiopian Airways’ train flights from Addis Ababa. Additionally, the airport has viewed a surge in garment shipments from China following the originate of Shanghai Airways’ train route from Shanghai to Marseille.
“Marseille can handle any form of aircrafts, reminiscent of the famed Antonov 124, which is chartered now and again by our neighbour Airbus to bring helicopters anyplace in the realm,” Boutigny said.
“Marseille Airport Authority is handling a explain-of-the-art 1,000 sq m frigid room facility, agreed by European Sanitary Inspectors.
“This first line warehouse is starting up 24/7, that’s why we even handle fresh plant life, vegetables and fruit with final destination Barcelona, Paris and even Amsterdam.”
