AirTran Airways will end its fledgling cargo business this week, pulling out of a market that executives once hoped would turn into a tidy side business for the Orlando-based airline.
AirTran spokesman David Hirschman said the airline decided to give up on cargo rather than pay for expensive, but necessary, tracking and monitoring improvements.
"Staying in the cargo business would have required significant new investments in all sorts of technology," Hirschman said. "We decided to exit the cargo business and focus exclusively on our passenger service."
AirTran will formally end its cargo operations Saturday. All of the roughly 30 employees who work in the cargo unit have been reassigned to other jobs, Hirschman said.
The decision was first reported by Air Cargo World, an industry magazine.
Cargo has never been particularly big business for AirTran, which is best known as a low-cost passenger carrier. The cargo unit rang up just $3.1 million in revenue through the first nine months of the year, a tiny fraction of the $1.6 billion generated by its passenger operations.
But as recently as last year, AirTran executives were saying that they viewed cargo as a potential growth area. Many passenger airlines carry cargo -- such as car parts, electronics and industrial equipment -- alongside luggage in the underbellies of their jets, using it as another way to squeeze money out of each flight.
Hirschman said the company has since decided that it did not want carrying cargo to detract from carrying passengers.
"We wanted to eliminate anything that had any potential to distract us from our core passenger service," he said.
Michael Boyd, an aviation consultant in Evergreen, Colo., said AirTran is smart to abandon cargo.
The airline's fleet -- composed entirely of Boeing 717s and 737s -- is not particularly well-equipped for the business, he said. Cargo also poses some unique challenges to passenger airlines, he said, such as a much higher rate of on-the-job accidents.
"It's not just carrying boxes," Boyd said. "You've got to know the business. You've got to focus on it. You can't do it just as a sideline."
