Birmingham Airport Authority and Kuehne+Nagel Partner on New Air Cargo Facility

Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport in Alabama has opened a new $31m air cargo facility that is being leased by Kuehne+Nagel (K+N) as part of a partnership between the forwarder and the airport.

The new 53,000 sq ft facility, which is located on the South Cargo ramp of the airfield, is being used by K+N to handle cargo related to its weekly freighter flights from Stuttgart, Germany into Birmingham-Shuttlesworth.

Following an agreement in February last year between K+N and the Birmingham Airport Authority, two months later K&N began flights into Birmingham-Shuttlesworth using Boeing 747-8 freighters operated by Atlas Air.

The flights have been operated out of a temporary base at the Kaiser Aircraft Industries hangar at Shuttlesworth, but now that the project has been completed K+N will begin to move cargo through the building. K+N is subcontracting warehouse management to Alliance Ground International (AGI).

Designed by CHA Consulting, the facility includes 48,500 sq ft of warehouse space, 17 loading bays, five airside bay doors, two airside and two landside rollup doors and office space.

“This facility is the result of a lot of hard work and a strong belief that Birmingham should play a key role in moving cargo in the southeast,” said Ronald Mathieu, president and chief executive of the Birmingham Airport Authority.

K+N’s operations at the airport are its first at a secondary airport in North America. The freight forwarder and the airport authority aim to expand air cargo business in the southeastern corridor of the US.

The partnership signals a growing trend of using secondary airports to move air cargo in the US, said Birmingham Airport Authority. Smaller airports that have the infrastructure and
warehousing capacity in place have an opportunity to move cargo faster, cheaper, and on a more predictable schedule than is possible at larger, more congested airports.