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It is 400 kilometers by car or 50 minutes by plane from Zurich to Frankfurt am Main. The main German airport is the headquarters of the Swiss parent company Lufthansa and the largest European transshipment point for highly sensitive pharmaceuticals that need to be specially cooled. This also includes potential coronavirus vaccines.
Lufthansa uses 8,800 of the airport’s 13,500 square meters of cooling space. Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr (53) is banking on a “large and highly profitable business” for its subsidiary Lufthansa Cargo. “As sad as it is, this crisis and the need for vaccinations, this is going to be a bigger business,” he said recently. Lufthansa and its subsidiary Swiss Worldcargo are among the few airlines in the world to offer seamless refrigerated transport.
It is necessary to cool to minus 80 degrees Celsius
All logistic threads join the Frankfurt Air Cargo Community. Since March, your pharmaceutical working group has been working on various scenarios to prepare the supply chain, says Joachim von Winning, chief executive of the Air Cargo Community, the Reuters news agency.
The corona vaccine candidate from Biontech and Pfizer, of which Switzerland has reserved around three million doses, is challenging. According to the current state, they must be transported in temperatures down to minus 80 degrees Celsius.
“For air transport, there are special, so-called active, electronically controllable and controllable containers that are very expensive – they cost about as much as a small car,” von Winning told Reuters. Manufacturers – such as Envirotainer from Sweden, Dokasch from Germany or C-Safe from the USA – have leased the shipping containers to airlines and freight forwarders. To achieve extreme cold, dry ice is used, but for safety reasons this limits the permitted amount of goods.
Global supply of corona vaccines
Why dry ice secretes CO2 the one that removes the air from the people on board to breathe. According to DHL, long-haul aircraft such as the Boeing 777 can carry a maximum of 1088 kilograms of dry ice. “Depending on the type of aircraft, there are usually no more than a few containers on board at one time,” says von Winning.
Estimates of how many flights must take off for a global supply of corona vaccines range from 8,000 by the international aviation association IATA to about 15,000 by DHL. To get a piece of this cake, a Lufthansa Cargo task force has been working on the organization since June, taking into account all possible scenarios. (uro)
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