It has been an exciting month. We were delighted to have been involved with shipping two giant pandas from Chengdu to Hong Kong. The pandas were a gift from the Central Government to Hong Kong to commemorate the anniversary of the city’s return to Chinese sovereignty, in what is the 75th year since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China. This confluence of events made it a very significant shipment with many, many stakeholders involved in planning and implementation – far more than any other Cathay Live Animal shipment! That it all came together at a Hong Kong celebratory welcome event was a testimony to our teamwork and planning and reconfirmed that We Know How. 

This can-do ethos was also to the fore with several shipments of fragile architectural models and other precious artefacts for the IM Pei retrospective at Hong Kong’s M+ Museum using our Cathay Expert solution. These pieces flew in from origin cities all across the Americas, and we are proud to be the museum’s official travel partner for this enlightening exhibition. 

The peak also marks the start of the winter flying schedule. We are pleased to welcome some new routes, the return of other popular seasonal services adding more passenger-belly capacity, along with more transpacific frequencies for our freighters this winter and some mitigations against the inevitable snowstorms that can affect Anchorage. Things will be better still at our Alaskan freighter tech-stop from winter 2025, when our new agreement with NorthLink Aviation will guarantee access to parking bays, helping maintain schedule integrity during disruption. There will also be new warehousing and some environmental benefits for more sustainable operations at this most important outport for our transpacific operations.

In terms of the wider industry picture, the peak continues and, by the start of October, air cargo recorded nine consecutive months of year-on-year growth. In the summer, we were anticipating a very busy peak period and there was a lot of procurement of advance peak space agreements, so it was a bit of a surprise to see not much of a spike in demand immediately prior to Golden Week. But we feel there were some other factors at play. 

These included a degree of over-capacity from freighter charters secured in advance by some of the big e-commerce giants, which removed some of the impetus of an ad-hoc pre-Golden Week surge. We remain busy and I believe the stability that regular carriers such as Cathay Pacific offer on the main deck or in passenger bellies gives us an advantage of strength through a stable and reliable schedule.

Finally, geopolitical events are leaving an impact on cargo operations, with more pre-loading information requirements for shipments from Europe and Central Asia to the US and Canada, which do not affect us too much, and also Australia, which do. You can read more about that below, but for now I wish you the best during the busiest period of the air-cargo calendar year.