Anchorage airport swarms with jets hauling presents
Holiday season stirs big rush for package delivery operations from overseas
The distinctive shape of a ANCHORAGE McDonnell Douglas MD- 11 tri- jet appears out of the darkness and lumbers onto the UPS cargo ramp at Anchorage International Airport on a particularly cold December evening.
Bundled- up ramp workers hustle out to meet flight UPS81, recently arrived from Osaka, Japan. It will continue on to the company’s home base in Louisville in just over two hours.
As the engines shut down and the parking brake is set, the race to get the airplane and its 98.5 tons of holiday- rush packages back into the air begins. Cleaning crews service the cockpit and crew- rest areas. Mechanics check the engines and top off the oil.
Meals for the next crew are shuttled on board while 22,000 gallons of fuel are added for the next flight.
Ramp workers open the MD- 11’ s giant cargo door and begin a careful ballet. Bed-room-sized air cargo containers — destined for other places in the U. S., or which simply are not as time sensitive — are pulled off and stored nearby to await their next flight. New containers from jets that arrived earlier in the day, typically from elsewhere in Asia, are loaded on.
The jet’s new crew boards an hour before departure, running pre- flight checks and verifying everything is good to go. Two hours and thirty- fiveminutes later, the airplane is airborne once again.
The bustling scene is repeated an average of 14 times a day during the holiday cargo rush, which runs from Black Friday to New Year’s Eve. Compared to its normal schedule, UPS says it has already operated 100 extra flights through Anchorage in November. December looks to be equally busy.
“It’s an all hands on deck time of year,” UPS spokesperson Jim Mayer said during a recent tour of the facility.
During the holiday shipping stretch, UPS anticipates delivering over 700 million packages. Put another way, it means that if your holiday gifts started in Asia, the odds are good that they first passed through Anchorage en route to your doorstep.
That Alaskan stopover might seem strange since the company operates widebody jets like the Boeing 747, which can easily fly non- stop from Asian destinations — such as those in China and Japan — to much of the mainland U. S. But it’s not quite that simple when those planes are packed full of cargo.
“We are not capable of making the flight full,” said Capt. Scott Jarman, the Anchorage Assistant Chief Pilot for UPS.
“It’s an efficiency thing. If you come out of Asia and you want to fly non- stop, you take just such a huge payload hit” to do so, adds Mayer, noting the capacity of a 747400 can be reduced by as much at 35% to fly non- stop. “You’re leaving a lot of packages behind just because you want to fly nonstop,” he said.
Which is another way of saying it’s a money thing.
“Nobody’s paying you to carry gas,” Anchorage International Airport manager John Parrott said during a phone interview. “A typical 747- 400 can put on an additional 100,000 pounds of cargo by stopping in Anchorage.”
Anchorage’s location and cargo- friendly procedures have made it a popular stop for freight operators.
Dozens of carriers fly roughly 70 widebody jets through Anchorage on a typical day. During the holiday season, that number balloons to a 80 to 85 a day, Parrott said.
“It’s an all hands on deck time of year.” UPS spokesperson Jim Mayer