East Midland Region – Airport Visit
On the evening of 7th May a group of 12 (the maximum allowed) made a very interesting and frankly surprising visit to the East Midlands Airport which is equidistant from Nottingham, Derby and Leicester. Our visit began at 7pm and went on until 22.45 because we also visited the Eat Midlands DHL Aviation Hub.
We were surprised by a whole range of statistics and facts, some of which are shown below.
- East Midland Airport (EMA) Limited employs only 270 people, thousands more are employees of airlines and freight handlers.
- EMA is the largest freight handling airport in the UK and is afforded this status by its central location.
- 97% of activity through EMA is freight related
- Current strategies centre on noise reduction , greater airport utilisation and carbon emission reduction and of course cash generation through innovative use of building and facilities.
- The single runway has sufficient spare capacity to handle growth for c 20 years
- Recent government papers suggest growth could be as much as 30% by 2050.
Moving on to the DHL hub we were amazed by the sheer scale of the operation which is tucked away at the far end of the site – again a few facts.
- 63-acre site with 4 kms of conveyors and 30,000 m2 of warehouse operations
- up to 45,000 shipments per hour
- parking for 105 trucks and 18 aircraft
- 24/7 operation handling 1,200 tonnes of material every night.
- Flights to Europe and the US and beyond every night
The purpose of the facility is to act as a central sortation, processing and connection hub for international and domestic fright traffic, one of 12 across Europe. As productivity managers we were interested to see the mix between automation and manual handling for processing operations and again were surprised to see a high degree of manual sorting.
In conclusion we all thoroughly enjoyed the visit, which for our Region is the main event this year. Our thanks go the very keen and kind staff who stayed behind after their working day to host our visit.
Geoff Mansfield
East Midland Region
