What has Cathay Pacific been doing to prepare for the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines?
We’ve been busy for several months ensuring that we’re ready to meet the biggest logistical challenge that the air cargo industry has ever encountered. We’ve taken stock and have made some changes specifically with these forthcoming vaccine shipments in mind.
That started several months ago, when we created a vaccine taskforce to pool and build on our existing knowledge and experience. From there, we created our own vaccine solution for the industry. We are the third-largest freight carrier in the world, and with our 20 dedicated freighters and cargo bellies of passenger aircraft supporting our extensive freighter network, we stand ready to assist with what will be the biggest humanitarian response to a situation involving civil aviation that anyone has ever seen. We are confident about meeting the challenge, and we stand ready to play our part.
Tell us about the vaccine solution.
First, it’s worth remembering that we already have many years’ experience in handling and flying pharma shipments around the world – we’re a big operator in that field. The vaccine solution has for the most part been a question of building on these existing capabilities, on both the commercial and operational side. The difference is that the overall scale of this uplift is huge. With the vaccine being so valuable and in such limited supply, it’s critical that we get it right at every stage of the journey.
The vaccine solution brings together two of our existing cargo products: Pharma LIFT, our renowned temperature-controlled and specialist pharma handling product, and Priority LIFT, our express product which offers ‘flown as booked’ priority upload. This is then underpinned by our new next-generation track-and-trace solution, Ultra Track.
Ultra Track will allow forwarders to monitor the condition of their vaccine shipments in real time. It will be progressively rolled out through the first quarter of next year, and we will be offering the service for any COVID-19 vaccine shipments from all of the vaccine manufacturing centres.
The data from Ultra Track shipments will also be monitored by our new Operations Control Centre (OCC) in Hong Kong, which will have teams working 24/7 to keep an eye on shipments. They will be able to take early proactive steps at the first hint of a shipment going out of its specified temperature range, for example. They’ll be able to instruct our terminal teams to ensure there’s enough dry ice or charge in the batteries of containers – whatever remedial action is required.
What about storage for vaccines and transhipments?
We’ve been working on that too. The Cathay Cargo Terminal, run by CPSL [Cathay Pacific Services Limited], is able to temporarily hold and transit just over 6.6 million doses of vaccine a day. We have just expanded that so that it can handle an additional 500,000 doses. That’s more than 7 million doses, and there will be more cold storage coming online soon. This new cold room storage will be able to handle a further 1.6 million doses. Obviously, our terminal has full CEIV Pharma accreditation, and Cathay Cargo and our ground handling subsidiary HAS have both just been recertified by IATA too.