Comparison and contrast of the general facilities and operations at DFW and Dubai Cargo Village

Dallas has a facility with unique features like the automated people mover, under this system the supplier personnel maintain the system while the owner operator the system. Both the supplier and the owner shares the facilities, this system was designed and enforced by the APM program.

While in Dubai Cargo they don’t have the automated people movers systems. In terms of their size Dubai center is the bigger as compared to DFW. Both centers are similar in terms of meeting the regulation and standard set out by the aviation authority. (Uher 2005)

The `secret sauce` of the UPS Worldport operation

The hidden secret sauce of the worldport is the flex. This is because flex manages the configuration of the building. All the applications which rely on each other know the destination of the package. Flex executes the configuration two times within one particular day.

One his done during the night shift (for the packages of the next day) and the other is done during the day shift. (It process over three hundred thousands second day air packages) The package tracking data is fed into the UPS data center in Mahwah, NJ by the two systems (one for international and one for domestic).

The information is later used by the customer to locate their luggages or goods via the UPS website. After a package has completed its journey through the one hundred and twenty two miles, the package is directed to a destination chute that is loaded into a container, after which it is then rolled into the aircraft.

In the entire process packages are only handled twice by the human beings: this is during loading and when unloading. Before the containers are loaded to the aircraft, they are pushed into the automated scales where they are weighed and checked.

As the last container is being loaded into the aircraft, the conveyor’s belts hum ceases momentarily and the worldport becomes almost silent for a short duration. After a few hours a new team of TSG technicians start to inspect the IT hardware as they prepare for the next shift.

The system will be reconfigured and a new sort plan will be formulated by flex. This system can be used with other companies, if done it is likely to increase the efficiency of the services that the company is delivering. (Uher 2005)

Advantages and Disadvantages of the Hub and spoke system to MASkargo

The disadvantages are: Any disruption at the hub like a security problem or bad weather can result into delays into the entire system. secondly the operation efficiency of the entire system is greatly affected by hub’s capacity, thirdly it is difficult to schedule a flight given that the airline has to take into consideration all the needs of the spokes, lastly different airlines are selecting different cities has hubs this makes it difficult for the airline to get a reliable partner. . (Singh B 2003)

The advantages are: it centralizes the operation, this makes it cheaper for the company in terms of management; lastly all the packages can be separated at the hub. (Singh B 2003)

The major milestone achieved by Emirates Sky Cargo in 2005-2006

Emirates Sky cargo succeeded in achieving the following: they bought three Airbus A 310 301Ft in Germany. This was going to be the first airbus that the airline was going to have. By buying the airbus the company succeeded in increasing the number of customers that they were going to serve, the company has also built a new center which is the biggest in Middle East.

Comparison of the Dulles `Building 5` to MASkargo, Qatar and Emirates centers

The cargo building 5 has a handling space that measures 250,000 square feet, it has windows mezzanine office space measuring 37,000 square feet, its aircraft apron space is 440,450 square feet, storage space of 440,450 square feet.

This makes it bigger than the MASkargo center in Malaysia; however the building is smaller as compared to Emirates and the Qatar centers. The drainage system of the four centers are the same, this is because they have to adhere to the international standards.

The importance of capacity planning to airport management in regards to aircraft or passengers

Capacity planning is important because it helps the airport authority to handle the traffic at the airport. Whenever the airport authority knows the numbers of planes that the airport can handle they cannot not allow any excess plane to come into the airport, this will reduce the number of accidents that are likely to occur in the airport as a result of congestion.

Reference:

Singh B 2003 Cargo crunch Malaysian Business News paper June 16th 2003 issue

Uher M 2005 Schriftenreihe des Instituts für Transportwirtschaft & Logistik PDF retrieved from www.wu-wien.ac