Latam Airlines dusts off Covid playbook to move cargo in passenger cabin

Hail the return of the preighter. Latam Airlines is the first airline in four and a half years to operate a passenger plane with cargo loaded in the cabin. 

The South American carrier said it activated an Airbus A319 to deliver emergency aid from Quito, Ecuador, to the Galapagos Islands, which suffered flooding after being hit by heavy rains, and stored cargo in passenger seats in addition to the lower deck.

When air travel and the global economy shut down in 2020 during the Covid pandemic many airlines quickly turned passenger aircraft into temporary freighters, commonly referred to as preighters, often loading cartons in the cabin where people normally sit to meet soaring demand for medical supplies and other goods in high demand. Those flights ended by the first half of 2022 as the travel industry and other cargo transport modes rebounded. 

Latam Airlines said it transported about 28,450 pounds of food, water and hygiene kits last week for more than 2,000 families impacted by the flooding on Santa Cruz Island. Latam donated the relief flight at the request of the Chamber of Industries and Production and Grupo Entregas, according to the news release. 

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Latam Cargo, which separately operates 19 Boeing 767-300 cargo jets, helped coordinate logistics for the flight. The medium widebody freighters couldn’t be used, Latam said, because Baltra Airport doesn’t have a long-enough runway to handle a fully-loaded jet of that size and officials didn’t want to reduce the amount of aid that could be delivered. 

On a regular passenger flight, an A319 can carry about 7,700 pounds of cargo. With no passengers and only the hold in use, it can carry about 15,000 pounds. By utilizing the cabin seats, the flight was able to carry another 13,450 pounds of relief supplies, nearly doubling the maximum cargo payload 

Why It Matters: Latam’s use of a jet to move cargo is unusual because the use of passenger aircraft as auxiliary freighters ended when the world recovered from Covid in 2022.

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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Source: FreightWaves