FedEx will relocate its Central and Eastern Europe hub and transfer up to 60 weekly flights fromFrankfurt airport to Cologne/Bonn in 2010 under a 30-year contract. The airport authority will
invest about EUR 70 million in a new handling facility and FedEx a similar amount in associatedmeasures, it was announced today.The airport will shortly seek political approval for night flights beyond 2015 to ensure thatboth FedEx and UPS, which already operates its European air hub at Cologne, can operate at night asrequired, officials disclosed at a joint press conference.
Under a 30-year agreement, with a 20-year extension option, Cologne airport will invest someEUR 70 million in a new 50,000 sqm freight handling building that is due to go into service in May2010. This will be able to sort some 12,000 parcels per hour, making it more than four times largerthan FedEx’s present Frankfurt facility in capacity terms.
Michael Mühlberger, FedEx Express Vice President Operations Central and Eastern Europe, saidthat capacity restrictions at Frankfurt and the planned night flight ban there had been the majorfactors in the decision to move on expiry of the contract with Fraport in 2010. FedEx had been intalks with other German airports but Cologne offered the best operating conditions due to thelong-term planning certainty, he commented.
Describing it as “one of FedEx’s largest investments in Europe for many years”, Mühlbergersaid FedEx will invest a similar amount at Cologne as the airport operator. It will station threeMD-11 freighters and operate about 60 weekly flights at the airport, including one-third of them atnight. The sorting system will be FedEx’s first fully-automatic sorting system outside theUSA.
But he stressed that FedEx had no plans to build up any night-time hub operation at Cologneand would not transfer any flights from its Europe hub in Paris to the German airport. FedEx willretain one MD-11F in Frankfurt for US flights.
Cologne airport managing director Michael Garvens said the acquisition of FedEx as a newcustomer was a “milestone” for the airport and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s topexport region. It would create some 500 jobs, thus partly compensating for the loss of DHL andLufthansa Cargo which are due to relocate to Leipzig at the end of this year with the loss of 800jobs and some 200,000 tonnes of freight annually. FedEx volumes would be about 25%-35% of thisfigure, he said. Cologne hoped to fully compensate for the lost DHL tonnage over the next 3-5years.
There would be far fewer night flights at Cologne in future, Garvens stressed. DHL andLufthansa Cargo currently operate about 130 flights between 22:00 and 06:00 at the airport, whileFedEx would operate 18 initially and then only gradually increase them. He expected that the newnight flight regulation would permit night-time flights at Cologne for 10-15 years beyond thecurrent 2015 deadline.
FedEx currently has intercontinental flights between Frankfurt and its US hubs in Memphis,New York and Indianapolis, along with Shanghai, Delhi/Mumbai, Tokyo/Nagoya and its Asia Pacific hubat Subic Bay. It also has European feeder flights to/from its Paris hub as well as to/from Munich,London-Stansted, Milan, Athens, as well as Tel Aviv.
Cologne/Bonn is already the home of the UPS European air hub which was doubled in capacityterms in a $135 million investment in 2005/06. The US integrator has flights between CGN and itsLouisville hub, as well as various intercontinental and European destinations.
