Lambert Fields China Mission

On February 27, Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge, director of Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, flew to China to begin negotiations with China Cargo Airlines to land cargo flights from China at Lambert.

She told the audience at a St. Louis Council of Construction Consumers' presentation on transportation infrastructure that she hopes China Cargo Airlines will begin landing three flights a week at Lambert this summer and grow its schedule to 30 flights a week by 2015.

“Cargo drives development, passenger travel does not,” she said. “This will lead to significant economic development for the airport, the county, and the St. Louis region,” she said.

John Kasarda, co-author of Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next and director of the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina, said in a telephone interview that he applauds St. Louis for going after air cargo from China.

Kasarda coined the term aerotropolis in 2000 to describe what he calls a new urban form, in which airports are the new city centers with distribution centers, office buildings, light manufacturing,  convention centers and hotels all growing around them and linked to airports by roads and rail lines.

He theorized that airports will drive urban growth and economic development in the twenty-first century in the same way that highways drove development in the twentieth century and railroads drove development in the nineteenth century.

Recognizing that American carriers have well established freight hubs that would be hard to move, St. Louis civic leaders chose to chase a Chinese carrier seeking to establish a presence in the North American market. In January, the Chinese government designated China Cargo Airlines to negotiate with St. Louis.

China Cargo Airlines is a subsidiary of China's largest air cargo carrier, China Eastern Airlines. Last year, China Eastern Airlines sold minority stakes in China Cargo Airlines to Singapore International Airlines and Taiwan-based EVA airlines to raise cash for its expansion.

Kasarda said getting an agreement with China Cargo Airlines is just the start of a very steep climb to build an air cargo hub.

“St. Louis has lost a lot of its logistics infrastructure, hard and soft, with the decline of manufacturing there, the end of TWA, and the loss of American Airlines,” he said, explaining that landing freight is only part of the process, getting it out of the airport and to its destination quickly is the other part.

“St. Louis will have to build relationships with freight forwarders and third-party logistics providers, establish procedures for fast customs clearance, for quick licensing and permitting, for electronic transactions, and so on,” he said. “And it takes landing more than one flight a day to develop that,” he said.

Columns