FREIGHT THREAT TODOCK JOBS

Philip In the last ten years over 8 million immigrant workers have flooded into the Common Market countries from southern Europe and north Africa.

They provided the bourseen from the deep-going poverty and degradation which still exists in the countries of the old empires.

Today the Common Market is associated with 18 former African colonies of the Six, three Commonwealth countries in East Africa, and Turkey, Greece and Malta. And trading agreements have been building sites in Paris.

In France, where there are more than 3.2 million immigrant workers, many of them have been crowded together in ghetto shanty towns on the outskirts of the cities built out of flattened petrol cans.

Now, as unemployment rises in Europe, the plight of these Airlines who are finding their passenger potential exhausted are turning to a relatively new but lucrative field of air freight.

Despite the recent recession common to all forms of freight transport many of the major airlines are convinced that an increasing proportion of cargo will fall into their laps. The development means profits for the big transporters, like BEA, BOAC and Lufthansa, but further depression for the traditional dockland areas of the Lufthansa have pioneered a new service which has taken them to the top position in the European air-freight league, above BEA.

Startling resuits They have just put into service a Boeing 747F jet which is a purpose-built, all-freight aircraft. The first results are startling, on its eastbound flight from New York to Frankfurt the 747F carries 89.2 metric tons of cargo.

This, of course, is less than a full sea-ship load but Lufthansa can take this kind of cargo across the Atlantic six days a week from the Frankfurt cargo centre, whereas a modern ship can take anything up to 15 to 21 days to make the sea voyage-and this ignores the lengthy wait at the docks at either end of the journey.

The 747F is built to take 28 containers, 8 ft wide, 8 ft high and 10 ft long, as well as palletized and grouped loads.

The costs are higher per mile than the sea voyage, but the saving in time is phenomenal. The plane has a turnround time of two hours-and all but 30 minutes of this is taken up by refuelling.

Eventually great time savings at the cargo centres are hoped for with round-the-clock working and night flights. Lufthansa are planning the full STAGGERING computerization of their operations and have been working for six years on a cargo consultancy service in a bid to convince exporters that loads, other than perishable cargo, can be best transported by air.

The only goods still totally unsuited for air freight are bulks-grain, ores or liquidsbut now Boeing think it's feasible to build a plane that can carry these types of commodities as well.

At present only 0.4 per cent of the North American dry cargo freight travels by air, but the total is growing all the time.

According to Karl Zingelman, Lufthansa's cargo manager for western Europe, cargo is destined to overtake the passenger trade as the No. 1 money spinner for the airlines.

'All forms of transport developed as passenger carriers. Cargo was a side issue, he says. 'But on sea, road and rail cargo quickly outgrew passengers. The same thing will happen to air transport. We all agree it will come. The only difference among us is as to when. Ten years? Thirty years? Our passenger potential nearly exhausted, but freight 1S not tapped. Potential is yet Advance lass jobs The impact of air freight can be exaggerated. Many of heavier sea-going cargoes vastly uneconomical to transport by air. But with products where the cost-to-weight ratio is high, like machine tools and other machinery that need careful handling, the plane is the best carrier.

As always, technical advance will mean less jobs. The freight the airlines win will be lost to the docks and there will be no compensating increase in employment at the airports.

The internal power systems on the cargo jumbo jets allow the two-man crew to store and secure a maximum load in 30 minutes!

Total unemployment in the US is now 5 million. But it is clear that the youth are feeling