Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), located in the US state of Texas and the world’s number four airport in terms of flight operations, will launch the first stage of a three-stage air cargo expansion project late this year. This was reported by DFW executive VP: global strategy and development John Ackerman in an interview with The STAT Trade Times.

“It will be creating approximately 300 000 square feet [about 27 871 m²] of new warehouse space,” he said. “That will be the first new cargo facility that’s been built at DFW in well over a decade and the interest we’ve had from the market so far has been phenomenal. By constructing these new facilities, what we intend to do is curate the mix of tenants to make sure that we have the most efficient cargo ecosystem at DFW.”

Cargo traffic through the airport had been hit by the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, he noted, with the widespread grounding of airliners causing the loss of their belly hold cargo capacity (which accounted for about 12% of the air cargo capacity at DFW). Air cargo shipped through the airport last year was 872 000 t, which was down some 11% on 2019.

However, a recovery started during the second half of last year. And that recovery has continued during this year. Some wide-body airliner services have resumed, meaning that their belly hold cargo capacity has again become available. During the first half of this year DFW processed 484 448 t of air cargo, which was an increase of just over 15% on the figure for the same period in 2018.

Three years ago, the airport commissioned an up-to-date cool chain facility (operated by a company called dnata) and subsequently became only the second airport in North America to secure Iata CEIV Pharma cargo certification. This means that it can handle pharmaceutical cargoes, including vaccines. (Iata is the International Air Transport Association.)

“After we got through April, and May, we got passenger freighters and charters, and the cargo market rapidly reorganised itself,” he reported. “And so once that capacity started coming back into the market, we saw our numbers begin to recover. So we’re seeing a good recovery at this point and we expect our calendar year 2021 to be slightly better than 2019, you know, up by probably 1% or 2%, from 2019. We think that if these trends continue, we should finish 2021 slightly ahead of 2019.”