Kühne+Nagel builds presence at Alabama airport

On April 2, Kühne+Nagel will fly from Stuttgart to Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport (BHM) in the US state of Alabama for the first time. The logistics company, based in the Swiss canton of Schwyz and with an American location in Jersey City, and the airport authority have announced a corresponding partnership. This will also be the company’s first freight flight from Stuttgart to the eastern USA.

According to a press release, Kühne+Nagel will offer weekly international freight flights to BHM from April 2023. Greg Martin, Senior Vice President für Air Logistics at Kühne+Nagel, commented that this, the first presence at a secondary airport in the USA, will enable them to help customers “get their cargo to its final destination more quickly, affordably and reliably by avoiding the bottlenecks at larger airports”. This “Southeastern Corridor” is also attractive to Kühne+Nagel “because of the ability to better meet the precise needs of its customers in the automotive, aviation, and pharmaceutical industries through features such as additional cargo capacity, temperature-controlled cargo space, and more.”

At the same time, this is the first partnership with a logistics company that BHM has agreed. The ground-breaking ceremony will be held for a new airfreight facility costing 25 million US dollars in May. After ten months of construction, Kühne+Nagel plans to move there from a hangar. These improvements to the airport’s infrastructure were approached with this new partnership in mind. Darlene Wilson, Chair of the Birmingham Airport Authority, stated that the expansion of airfreight in the region would change the trajectory of the airport. mm