"Flight" LH7000

Christa Pannke and her team put airfreight in Europe on the road. From an office in Frankfurt she controls the operation of up to 100,000 truck trips per year.

Sunday evening, 8.30 p.m. Many people in German living rooms have been watching the crime series “Tatort” for about 15 minutes. In Cargo Area North at Frankfurt Airport, flight number LH7000 is docking in truck dispatch lane 7. The 40-tonner will be loading four aircraft pallets with garments on this particular day. The cargo, 15 tons with a volume of 68 cubic meters, arrived from Asia on Saturday and is scheduled for onward transportation to Hamburg. The shipment would not have fit into an Airbus A320 or the even smaller Boeing 737. One lane farther along, the loading for LH7370 to Oslo is more or less completed. Spare parts for drilling platforms in the North Sea are on board. “Departure time” for both truck combinations is 9 p.m.

The person responsible for the smooth running of this complementary airfreight trucking service, known among experts as Road Feeder Service (RFS), is Christa Pannke and the 28 members of her team. RFS could be described as flying at zero level. For every truck trip is treated at Lufthansa Cargo like a flight. That is why the trucks operate with flight numbers. “In European traffic there is a shortage of loading capacities to transport all goods by air from and to the intercontinental airports such as Frankfurt and Munich,” says Pannke. “And in many cases the cargo is simply too big for the small short- and medium-haul jets.” The alternative is the truck.

In the huge cargo halls, only men move the heavy pallets. In the cabs of the trucks, there are usually men of all nationalities. So how did Christa Pannke come to find herself in charge in a job that is otherwise dominated by men?

She is also unable to really explain it her­self. She had undoubtedly already learned to assert herself against the male sex in her family: one man and four sons sat at the table. Originally, she wanted to become a civil servant. As a teacher of mathematics and politics. That plan also worked out at the beginning of the Eighties, but only for a few months in the year. Like thousands of her “fellow sufferers” she was only employed as a teacher temporarily despite her excellent final exam results.

At some stage, she thought about alternatives. In 1984, Christa Pannke applied for work at Lufthansa. Its human resources department was delighted: “The lady has studied mathematics, she can deal with figures, we’ll take her for accounting.” Things turned out quite differently on the very first day. The head of the department flicked through her CV, asked a few questions and came to the conclusion: “You are too good for accounting, I can put you to better use in cargo.”

Christa Pannke was assigned to Lufthansa Cargo. Initially as the assistant to the boss, later, to an increasing extent, standing on her own two feet. She learned about all facets of the cargo business, which also included the fact that four-digit flight numbers that begin with a 7 are allocated to trucks. For this reason, she used to get annoyed in Frankfurt about the growing tailbacks outside the Gotthard Tunnel in Switzerland. They were messing up the timetable. Every Friday, the team led by Christa Pannke look with bated breath to the bottleneck in Italian-German transit traffic. That’s the day when up to
22 fully laden trucks make their way down to Upper Italy from Frankfurt.
Friday is always an extremely busy day at Frankfurt Airport, Europe’s biggest cargo hub. Trucks arrive from Tallinn and Stockholm, Rome and Madrid, Vienna and Warsaw, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and a whole host of other cities, bringing their freight to be loaded on the weekend into the MD-11 freighters of Lufthansa Cargo or the bellies of the Lufthansa’s intercontinental passenger airliners.

The daily RFS operations in Europe are controlled from inside the third floor of the plain and functional Cargo Building 420. The basic framework is a fixed timetable, in which the departure times from and to 80 European airports are specified to the exact minute from Monday to Sunday. The timetable has 1,500 trips per week. Every 18 months the journeys are again put out to tender by Lufthansa Cargo and the contracts awarded to the most competitive forwarders. Ten companies belong to the regular set of “scheduled forwarders”.
If the scheduled services have insufficient capacities, because more cargo than calculated in on the aircraft from Beijing, New York or Rio or because Sony Ericsson wants to send four additional big aircraft pallets with mobile phones from Stockholm to South Africa or because the buyer of a Lamborghini in Beijing is no longer willing to wait, the RFS team turns for assistance to the cargo exchange that was first set up in 2007. The cargo dispatchers put the order on the Internet for two hours. During this time, the 74 forwarders listed on the exchange can submit their offers.

Christa Pannke no longer thinks back to the school. What remains is the affinity of the qualified mathematician to figures. She has everything in her head, including the delay rate: “81.3 percent arrival performance in the year 2010.” And without catching her breath she immediately adds: “We were not satisfied with that. Our aim is 85 percent.” In view of the tailback-stricken German motorways and the growing caprices of weather conditions this is an ambitious goal.