Qatar Airways Cargo employees pose with boxes full of roses behind them.
Doha: That bunch of red roses that appears on your desk from an apparent “anonymous admirer,” those flowers you carefully select to take home to the special person at your side, the single-stemmed rose between the Flamenco Dancer’s teeth at a romantic, candle-lit dinner later that evening.
There is a good chance these flowers were among the 60 million roses flown out of Ecuador, Colombia, and Kenya, on board of one of the many Qatar Airways Cargo special charters and flights networking the world. Whereas the big day itself lasts just 24 hours, at Qatar Airways Cargo, customers and cargo teams begin preparing months in advance, “with the flower farms projecting more or less the tonnage that will move for the season,” Qatar Airways Cargo Vice President Cargo Americas Ian Morgan explained.
These forecasts determine whether additional flights are required to supplement the scheduled freighters during the peak flower transportation phase which begins around January 17 to 7 February. Similar to 2021, the effects of the pandemic on available capacity and resources posed an additional challenge during planning.
The main destinations out of Quito (UIO), Ecuador and Bogotá (BOG), Colombia, are in the US, Europe, Russia, and Australia. “This year, the Ecuadorian market had to deal with 24 percent less capacity into Europe, and around 16 percent less capacity into the US market,” illustrates Morgan, which led to three additional Quito-Miami (MIA) and four extra flights from Quito to Europe and onward to Doha, complementing the five regular weekly freighters out of Quito.
Colombia has been well served with its two scheduled flights per week out of Bogotá. However, the planning does not stop there; intricate, temperature-controlled onforwarding is also set up to ensure that the flowers arrive fresh and on time at their end-destinations. “We use road feeder services from where the…