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It is 400 kilometers by car or 50 minutes by plane from Zurich to Frankfurt am Main. The main German airport is the headquarters of the Swiss parent company Lufthansa and the largest transshipment point in Europe for highly sensitive pharmaceuticals that need to be specially cooled. This also includes possible vaccines against the coronavirus.
Lufthansa uses 8,800 of the airport’s 13,500 square meters of cooling space. Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr (53) is betting on a “big and very profitable business” for the freight subsidiary Lufthansa Cargo. “As sad as it is, this crisis and the need for vaccines, this will be a bigger issue,” he said recently. Lufthansa and its subsidiary Swiss Worldcargo are among the few airlines in the world that offer non-stop refrigerated transportation.
It is necessary to cool down to minus 80 degrees Celsius
All the threads of logistics come together at Air Cargo Community Frankfurt. Its pharmaceutical working group has been grappling with various scenarios to prepare the supply chain since March, says Joachim von Winning, chief executive of Air Cargo Community, the Reuters news agency.
Biontech and Pfizer’s corona vaccine candidate, of which Switzerland has reserved around three million doses, is a challenge. According to the current state, they must be transported at temperatures down to minus 80 degrees Celsius.
“For air transport, there are special containers, called active, electronically controllable and controllable that are very expensive, they cost as much as a small car,” von Winning told Reuters. Manufacturers, such as Envirotainer from Sweden, Dokasch from Germany or C-Safe from the USA, rented the shipping containers to airlines and freight forwarders. Dry ice is used to achieve extreme cold, but for safety reasons this limits the amount of cargo allowed.
Global supply of corona vaccines
Because dry ice secretes CO2 which takes the air out of the people on board to breathe. According to DHL, long-haul planes like the Boeing 777 can carry a maximum of 1,088 kilograms of dry ice. “Depending on the type of aircraft, there are usually no more than a few containers on board at the same time,” says von Winning.
Estimates of how many flights have to take off for a global supply of corona vaccines range from 8,000 from the international aviation association IATA to around 15,000 from DHL. To get a piece of this pie, a working group from Lufthansa Cargo has been working on the organization since June, taking all possible scenarios into account. (aurochs)
