Over a long lunch in Luxembourg, we asked Ulrich Ogiermann, former CEO of Cargolux and Chief Cargo Officer at Qatar Airways, to look back at two decades that reshaped the freighter business.

Q: When you look at how shippers behave today versus, say, 2005, what’s the biggest shift?

Ulrich Ogiermann: The customer is a different animal now. Twenty years ago, our world revolved around forwarders and a fairly predictable mix of industrial freight. Garments out of Asia, automotive parts, pharmaceuticals, perishables, the occasional outsize project shipment. Volumes moved on contracts that you could plan around.

Then e-commerce arrived properly, and the centre of gravity moved. Suddenly a large share of what we were flying was small parcels going to consumers, not pallets going to factories. That changed everything downstream. Handling agents had to rethink warehouses. Customs processes had to cope with millions of low-value shipments instead of thousands of commercial invoices. The traditional combination carriers, the ones who grew up on bellyhold and a steady industrial book, had to decide whether to chase that traffic or leave it to the integrators and the new Chinese platforms.

What people sometimes miss is that B2C didn’t replace B2B. It sat on top of it. So the industry got busier and more volatile at the same time. Demand spikes are sharper now. A promotion in one market can move tonnage in a way we never saw before.

Q: Digitalisation was the great promise at every conference in the 2000s. Did it actually arrive?

Ulrich Ogiermann: Partly. I remember sitting through panels around 2006, 2007, where we were going to be paperless within five years. End-to-end visibility, dynamic pricing, the lot. The slides were beautiful.

The reality was slower and messier. The e-AWB took longer to become normal than anyone wanted to admit. Booking platforms went through several waves before something stuck. For years you had airlines investing serious money in systems that didn’t talk to the forwarder’s systems, and forwarders building their own portals that didn’t talk to the airline’s. Everyone was digital on their own island.

What genuinely changed things was, frankly, the pandemic. When people couldn’t walk into an office and hand over a piece of paper, the workarounds had to go. Capacity was so tight that whoever could quote and confirm fastest won the booking. That did more for digital adoption in eighteen months than a decade of conference panels.

It’s still not where it should be. The industry remains more fragmented than it pretends to be. But the direction is finally honest.

Q: And sustainability? That’s gone from a footnote to the front page.

Ulrich Ogiermann: Completely. When I started at Cargolux in the late nineties, environmental questions were essentially about noise quotas at certain airports and fuel efficiency for cost reasons. Nobody used the word sustainability in a board meeting. If you’d raised CO2 in a commercial review, people would have looked at you politely and moved on.

By the time I was at Qatar Airways, it was beginning to be a serious agenda item. Now it’s unavoidable. Customers ask for emissions data on individual shipments. Investors and lenders ask about transition plans. Regulators in Europe in particular are setting timelines that the industry has to meet whether the technology and the fuel supply are ready or not.

I’m not cynical about it. The direction is right. But I do think we have to be honest that sustainable aviation fuel at the volumes and prices being discussed is a significant challenge, especially for cargo, which is more price-sensitive than passenger. The conversation has moved on enormously, though. That’s the change.

Q: After all of that, what hasn’t changed?

Ulrich Ogiermann: The fundamentals. Air cargo is still a service business that lives or dies on whether the shipment arrives where it’s supposed to be, in the condition it’s supposed to be in, on the day it’s supposed to be there. All the technology and all the new demand patterns sit on top of that simple fact.

The other thing that hasn’t changed is the cyclicality. We’ve had good years and bad years for as long as I can remember, and anyone who tells you they’ve found a way to flatten that curve is selling something. You build your fleet and your network for the long run and you accept that some years will be painful. The companies that survive are the ones who don’t lose their nerve in the down cycle and don’t lose their discipline in the up cycle.

And it’s still a people business. The relationships between airlines, forwarders, ground handlers, shippers, they matter as much as they did thirty years ago. The names on the contracts change. The handshake, in whatever modern form, still counts.