Talk:List of cargo airlines

This should be a page

This is a brilliantly organized page. It should BE a page. Wikipedia lacks a well-organized and up-to-date list of cargo airlines. SurferSquall (talk) 21:21, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Issues

1) The page lacks any clear criteria, based on what is said in reliable, independent secondary sources, about what a "Cargo airline" even is. All air lines carry cargo so this is not "sky is blue". The link to the Wikipedia article about Cargo Airlines is not enlightening as this also does not include a definition of what a cargo airline is that is cited to a reliable, independent source. The Allaz Camille book I've added as a reference (the neutrality of which, I have to mention, is a bit suspect) to the article includes a definition of cargo airlines on p. 334 but it does not appear to be the one applied here. The book "Cargo Airlines" by Alan J. Wright lists Cargo Airlines without defining them at all. The Financial Times has an article about Air Cargo airlines that includes normal passenger hauliers.
2) The page lacked sources and therefore was distinctly unbrilliant. It now has them which should at least stop it from being deleted.
3) The page probably needs reorganising. A lot of the sources use total tonnage hauled as the way of ordering the airlines so this might be a good way of going. FOARP (talk) 11:36, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

A "cargo airline" as applies in this article is an airline that uses cargo-configured aircraft to haul solely cargo. SurferSquall (talk) 16:05, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Not sure why this would need reorganizing SurferSquall (talk) 16:06, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

SurferSquall - the issue is that this definition is not cited to anywhere. Reliable sources do not make such a clear-cut distinction. The Camille Allaz book discussed above described four classes of airline (and a fifth "phantom" one):

• 1) Cargo Charter Airlines
• 2) Scheduled Cargo Airlines
• 3) Passenger Airlines
• 4.1) Mixed Cargo-Passenger Airlines - first sub-group (more than half their traffic on cargo flights)
• 4.2) Mixed Cargo-Passenger Airlines - second sub-group (15-50% of their traffic on cargo flights)
• 5) "Phantom" turn-key cargo airlines

Now you might disagree with what this book says, but it's the closest thing we have right now to an actual definition of what a cargo airline actually is. Obviously, if this is unsatisfactory, we need to find better sources, but all of the sources I've seen appear to include airlines that carry passengers to some extent. Indeed, the rankings of which airlines ship the most cargo all appear to include what are patently passenger airlines. For example, the Alan J. Wright book includes China Airlines as a "cargo airline". I think, based on the Allaz book and just pure common sense, it might be reasonable to exclude her category 3) (i.e., pure passenger airlines, even if they do obviously transport freight as belly-cargo) but that still leaves you with the mixed airlines who may operate dedicated cargo-flights alongside passenger flights. Allaz's book, for example, includes Air France (explicitly the main airline, not just their cargo operation) in its rankings of cargo airlines. Our list includes "Air France Cargo", but we don't have any article about this supposed cargo airline, only redirects to the main article about Air France, which only mentions a short-lived operation called "Air France Cargo Asie" (a shell-business for operations in Taiwan) and no "Air France Cargo". Does "Air France Cargo" actually exist even as just a subsidiary of Air France? I can't find it from a brief Google search.

This article on top air cargo airlines also includes what are obviously airlines that also carry passengers and are not listed here. Now we could say these people don't know what they are talking about, but then what is our reliable source for what we are saying?

It might make more sense just to structure the article in terms of tonnage of cargo hauled. This is the structure used in the Allaz book and also in other sources. I think all of the data presently on-page could be kept (e.g., countries, regions, names) but as a sortable table giving the year and the tonnage of cargo hauled. This would also exclude listings of cargo airlines that are in reality very small or potentially don't exist independently of their parent companies, whilst accounting for the fact that some passenger airlines do actually ship quite a bit of cargo - something which our readers would surely like to know? Another option would the freight-tonne kilometres metric some sources use? Or CTK? FOARP (talk) 09:12, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

Name	Region	Country	Tonnage hauled	Year
Foo Air Cargo	Asia	Japan	123,456	2014
XYZ Air Cargo	Asia	Bhutan	133,456	2025
ABC Air Cargo	Africa	South Sudan	898,456	2020

FOARP (talk) 10:58, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

A few things:

• A sortable list by tonnage would be good, but where would that data be found?
• Air France operates a joint cargo operation with KLM and Martinair, and it’s the first result on Google search (I could write an article about it potentially, but then someone would say it’s not notable for its own separate article)
• China Airlines has a seperate division called “China Airlines Cargo” which operates Boeing 747 freighters
• This list just needs to be rewritten. We could have one section for solely cargo airlines, one section for passenger airlines flying cargo aircraft, and a third section for passenger airlines with no cargo aircraft but that fly belly cargo- or some other organization, if you have a better idea

SurferSquall (talk) 15:29, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

The IATA publishes an annual report called World Air Transport Statistics (WATS), which seems to be relied on by reliable sources (e.g., 1 2 3) and as such should be reliable. This article gives the scheduled CTK (cargo-tonne-kilometres, where basically each CTK represents the airline carry one tonne of cargo one kilometre) for the top 25 air-cargo hauliers in the world according to WATS (scroll to the bottom). For airlines with no stats, possibly they can be in another list? No hurry anyway.

Turns out we already have an article for Air France-KLM btw. FOARP (talk) 21:26, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

That article for Air France-KLM is about the group as a whole, and doesn't say much about the cargo division. SurferSquall (talk) 01:21, 19 May 2023 (UTC)