Emirates recently airlifted relief material comprising tents that can create 4,500 square metres of hospital space by the World Health Organization (WHO) to help India in the fight against COVID-19. Not just this, but Emirates has emerged as a prominent global airliner in transporting urgent COVID-19 relief material to countries in need. We got in touch with Abdulla Alkhallafi, Cargo Manager, India & Nepal to understand the cargo operations of Emirates and what planes they have deployed for these services.
Q.Tell us about the aid Emirates is transporting to help India fight COVID-19
Since the start of the pandemic, Emirates SkyCargo has played a key role in transporting vital commodities and medical equipment on scheduled and charter cargo flights to India and other parts of the world. Given the current serious COVID-19 situation in India, we are taking our support to the next level by launching a humanitarian airbridge between Dubai and India to facilitate urgent medical and relief aid to the country – including multipurpose tents with oxygen beds, oxygen concentrators, PPE suits, masks, safety boxes and syringes.
Emirates SkyCargo is offering all our available cargo capacity free of charge to NGOs on flights from Dubai to nine destinations in India. In co-ordination with the International Humanitarian City (IHC), our first shipment arrived in Delhi last week, carrying over 12 tons of multi-purpose tents from the World Health Organization (WHO). This was used to create an open field hospital space.
Emirates and Emirates SkyCargo are deeply connected and committed to India. From the time that we started operations in 1985, we have been operating to India. We therefore consider it our social responsibility to facilitate the transportation of relief materials to help get India back on its feet.
Q.How many flights are being operated by Emirates?
Emirates currently operates 95 weekly flights to 9 cities in India, including – Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Thiruvananthapuram. Any available cargo space on all of our Boeing 777 freighters and passenger aircraft are available for NGOs, free of charge for transporting relief materials. We have not capped the number of flights on which we will transport humanitarian assistance materials. We will do our part to support India and other markets affected by the pandemic and other crises to recover.
Q.Changes made to the existing cargo operations for the COVID-19 relief work?
Emirates SkyCargo has led the industry in its efforts to help markets around the world combat the COVID-19 pandemic. When passenger operations were suspended initially during COVID-19, we had to react very quickly to meet the immediate and urgent demand for transporting PPE and other urgently required supplies. We had to reinvent our complete business model overnight and ensure that we were fulfilling our social responsibility by transporting these urgently required commodities across the world.
Our first order of business was to restore air cargo connectivity to markets around the world so that we could continue transporting essential commodities that were required in the response to COVID-19. In order to do this, we started operating our Boeing 777-300ER passenger aircraft as cargo only aircraft. This had never been done before and our team had to work within a very short time to plan our new route network, work with our partners across the world and also work with the relevant authorities to get the required permissions to operate the flight.
We were able to deploy these and increase our destination network from about 35 (served by our 11 Boeing 777 freighters) at the end of March to around 50 by April. Within 100 days from the end of March, we had re-established a network of more than 100 destinations across six continents.
In the meantime, we also came up with other innovative solutions to increase the amount of air cargo capacity. This included loading cargo on the seats of passenger aircraft and in the overhead bins. Of course, before we introduced this, we also had to make a complete safety evaluation and develop guidelines for our worldwide team to follow. In the month of June, we also removed seats in Economy Class from 10 Boeing 777-300ER aircraft to convert them into what we like to call ‘mini-freighters’. We have also operated select cargo only flights on our Airbus A380 aircraft.
Within the space of one year, we had operated more than 27,800 cargo only flights on passenger aircraft, which was more than what was operated by any other carrier globally. We also had transported over 100,000 tonnes of relief items on these flights.
Emirates SkyCargo has also been an industry leader in the transportation of COVID-19 vaccines. The airfreight division of Emirates has also partnered with UNICEF and other entities in Dubai through the Dubai Vaccine Logistics Alliance, to transport COVID-19 vaccines rapidly to developing nations through Dubai. So far, more than 60 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been transported on Emirates’ flights.
Q.What’s the total tonnage Emirates is carrying as an aid against COVID-19?
Our first shipment from Dubai to Delhi transported 12 tonnes of multi-purpose tents from the World Health Organization (WHO) – which was used for an open field hospital space. Since then we have moved several shipments of relief materials including PPE and oxygen concentrators on our flights to India for other NGOs. We’re seeing that there is a lot of demand from global humanitarian organisations to send relief goods to India.
In the next few weeks, Emirates will transport more aid to India. The country is in dire need of oxygen concentrators, face masks, and PPE kits, and our wide-body Boeing 777 aircraft is able to provide greater capacity and capability to carry such relief materials.
Q.What countries are you flying from to bring India the relief material?
We have seen great demand across the world including countries across Europe, the Far East and the U.S. Our longstanding partnership with IHC connects India to a large network of NGOs in Dubai and we’re working closely with all our partners to help transport as many medical supplies as we can to the country.
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