Silk Way West growing horizontally, vertically

After taking delivery of its first B777F and ordering five more triple-seven freighter aircraft and two A350F, the Azerbaijani cargo airline is now increasingly focusing on expanding its ground infrastructure.

Its management recently unveiled plans to build a new cargo village with all the facilities needed to ensure fast and seamless freight flows, cargoforwarder.eu reports.

The project will be realized on a green field about 65 km south of Baku Heydar Aliyev International Airport (IATA: GYD), and includes a large runway as its centrepiece. The ground-breaking ceremony is due to take place next year and the first commercial flight is expected to take off in 2025.

The difference could hardly be greater. Lufthansa Cargo has been discussing the conversion or rebuilding of its CargoCenter at Frankfurt Airport’s CargoCity North for more than half a decade. Finally, the official go-ahead for the LCCevolution dubbed master plan was given last week. The entire project will be completed in 2030, states a press release.

In Baku, located around 3,500 km east of FRA, Silk Way West Airlines announced plans for a new runway complemented by an entire new cargo village just a short time ago, aiming to be ready to go online by 2025.

Two projects, two velocities. But to be fair, it must be emphasized that LCCevolution is significantly more complex than the infrastructural intent in Azerbaijan.

AFEZ bullet points

All this is to be built in the planned Alat Free Economic Zone (AFEZ) in Azerbaijan over the next two years:

a large cargo terminal for processing standard air freight shipments

a perishable centre located airside

two buildings to accommodate forwarding agents along with administration offices

various prefab units where individual industrial parts brought into the country are assembled and turned into finished products for export to third countries.

Attractive tax advantages offered

As to the last point: Foreign investors are assured that they are exempt of any taxes. They are guaranteed intellectual property rights and there will be no restrictions on currency transactions or the repatriation of their profits. Furthermore, the Azeri government declared that investors’ properties and funds are immune from any nationalization or expropriation measures.

Designed to becoming a multimodal hub

The overarching project of the master plan is the construction of a 4,000m-long runway that allows flights of safety category CAT IIIA, provided the aircraft are technically equipped for this. In addition to the taxiway, stands for 18 aircraft are to be built. A rail link and a highway will connect the port of Baku on the Caspian Sea and the city centre with the new airport, which will thus become a multimodal hub, attracting international but also regional cargo flows from neighbouring markets in the CIS region.

Silk Way West Airlines and the government in Baku are remaining silent about the future operator of the projected airport. It is more than doubtful that it will be state-owned Azerbaijan Airlines (dubbed AZAL), which runs Baku Heydar Aliyev International. Rumours have it that AZAL is under consideration.

However, aviation experts point out that the carrier’s mainstay is passenger traffic, but not air freight. Hence it wouldn’t fit to hand over responsibilities to a passenger airline to run an airport designated to become a future hub for cargo traffic.

Filling a gap

By pushing ahead with the master plan, the landlocked country is aiming to place itself on the international air freight map, attracting and interconnecting flows from the Far East, Europe, Africa, and the neighbouring CIS and Arabian regions. This requires a mix of long-haul freighters complemented by cargo aircraft fitting smaller volumes. This explains why Silk Way West’s President, Wolfgang Meier, hinted that his company is considering acquiring Boeing 767 freighters aimed at covering thinner routes.

This Boeing variant can accommodate around 55 tons, making it very useful for flights from Azerbaijan to India, the Arabian Peninsula or European destinations such as Hahn, Liège, Manchester, or Copenhagen, for example. In contrast, the B777F can carry 103 tons, the Airbus A350F 111 tons, and the B777-8F even 118 tons per take-off, making all of them ideal for serving routes offering high freight volumes.

With its horizontal and vertical growth, Silk Way West is increasingly filling the gap left by AirBridgeCargo after the Russian freight carrier’s operations were crippled by Western sanctions imposed on the Putin regime, following the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine.