MidAmerica airport flower figures and manifests don't tally: paper

MIDAMERICA St Louis airport authority declarations about full flower flights do not tally with figures on cargo manifests, a Belleville News-Democrat investigation has revealed.

Airport director Tim Cantwell has said flights headed north to MidAmerica and then southbound are "full both ways", said the newspaper, which covers the southern Illinois and St Louis, Missouri, regions.

"But Cantwell's assertion conflicts with information contained on a log of the 39 Arrow Cargo flights that landed at MidAmerica between October 30, 2008, and August 6, 2009, the date of the last flower flight," said the News Democrat report.

Mr Cantwell could not be reached for comment, said the newspaper.

The cargo log shows that most of the flower flights to MidAmerica were less than half full, averaging payloads of less than 22 tons apiece on the Arrow Cargo MD DC-10 cargo planes, which can haul more than 70 tons at a time, said the report.

Several MidAmerica flights headed south with just a few tons of cargo loaded on them. Overall, the average payload for the remaining 34 flights was about 8.7 tons apiece, the logs show, said the newspaper.

"There were multiple flights that were empty. No cargo going out, none," said Olga Munoz, the operational manager of the flower flights for the firm that until September had overseen the airport flower import business.

Ms Munoz said she was present for each landing of the 39 Arrow flights that landed and took off from MidAmerica, she said.

Steve Armellini, the owner of a flower truck firm in Miami, has monitored the airport's fledgling business.

Mr Armellini has known for months about MidAmerica's problems finding cargo to haul south, and expressed no surprise that Mr Cantwell stated the cargo flights are flying full each way.

"They got to build it up," said Mr Armellini, the president of Armellini Industries Inc. "They got to keep making people think it's going to work."

Mr Armellini blamed MidAmerica's problems on the recession, MidAmerica's initiation landing fees and other costs on Arrow Cargo.

"They just started charging the fees. The first months were free everything: free rent, free landing fees," Mr Armellini said. "So it was all subsidised. Once the subsidies stopped, so okay, you have to start paying for your landing fees, then the box rate went up US$3 a box."
 

Source: SchedNet