In response to my previous post, I read: > Terrell Brown is imagining a false situation. We are not shipping > freight via air from the Minneapolis airport; we are shipping it via > truck to Chicago and then via air freight from there.
I respond: I'm not sure what you think is going thru the facilities of FedEx, UPS and a few others out at MSP. I can assure you that they aren't carrying passengers and that they aren't flying empty. A huge volume of freight is domestic, not international. Northwest Airlines does a significant freight business, using both dedicated aircraft and the cargo area of passenger planes. What's getting shipped by air? Books from Amazon, computers, medicines, machine parts, Christmas and birthday gifts. If you've ever sent it via the post office or UPS, someone has been in a hurry and shipped it by air. Although most of it doesn't go into MSP, but to sattelite airports, there is also a large amount of small freight being moved. Back in the 1990's when I was working for a small air charter company over half of our business was freight. Probably the smallest things I ever carried were a circuit breaker that would have fit in my shirt pocket and bag of plastic washers. The bad was the size of a small bag of mini-carrots you might buy at a grocery store, but weighted signmificantly less. Usually the planes I was flying were not full, just carrying something that needed to be somewhere fast. Our first questions to a customer were "when do you need it" and "when does your plant go down (if you don't have it)"? > Further, while they did shut down the old airport, that hardly means > that the new airport is the only airport in the Denver metro > area. In > fact, Jefferson County Airport, just a few miles northwest > of downtown > Denver -- and much closer to downtown Denver than the new > airport -- is > one of the busiest reliever airports in the nation, and has been > expanded a number of times. [TB] Similar situation in most major cities. We have Flying Cloud, St. Paul Downtown, Crystal, Anoka County, Airlake, Lake Elmo, South St. Paul. Flying Cloud also goes into that "one of the busiest in the country" category. Fact is the large freight carriers aren't going there unless someone makes significant infrastructure additions. > 1. Northwest Airlines whined, bitched, moaned and complained, and > backed that up with a lot of backroom dealing and spreading > money around > lobbying and buying off officials. NWA did this because NWA > executives, > like most corporate executives these days, only care about their > personal short term gain, which means they only care about the > companies' stock prices and profitability over the next few > quarters at most. [TB] I suspect that today, every company in that industry is worried about their long term survival. That's one of the reasons that they are parking aircraft and laying off employees. Their business is down. Terrell Brown Loring Park Terrell at terrellbrown dot org Now on the web at: http://home.earthlink.net/~terrelljbrown/ TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
