مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The role airports play in the flow and development of cargo traffic from location to location cannot be overemphasised. Cargo agents, shippers and airlines alike are so conscious of this that efforts are put in place individually to ensure business is transacted with utmost efficiency at airports. Air cargo transportation is designed as a system to provide fast and efficient delivery of goods. Air transport as the fastest mode of transport is used to safely carry high-valued and time-critical goods. It is necessary to note that air cargo has its own rules, and need to be studied separately from passenger transport as airports need to develop separate strategies concerning air cargo to make them more competitive in the market (Kupfer et al., 2012). Developments in the overall air transport operations lay importance to cargo operations at airports alongside passenger handling by the airlines. To show the importance of cargo operations by passenger airlines, Kupfer et al. (2012) stated that about half of air cargo is still transported in the belly space of passenger aircraft or in combi-aircraft and is therefore partly influenced by passenger transport, and that there are very important differences between air freight transported in all-cargo aircraft and in passenger aircraft. The view of Woodrow (2012) emphasised the growing percentage of cargo that will have to be transported in passenger bellies of most modern Airbus and Boeing twin-engine aircrafts; while smaller freighter operators are likely to increasingly focus on optimising their belly space for cargo operations. The study of Merkert and Ploix (2014) further established the influence of passenger terminal reorganisation on belly-hold freight operations at airports.

Airports as terminal points in the transport system compete for traffic in multi-airport country such as Nigeria. Ohashi et al. (2005) detailed out airport choice factors for cargo transshipment in the North/East Asia region. The choice arises basically as a result of competition among airports. This possibly will make cargo agents prefer routing operations in one airport at the expense of the other even when the other airport is not close to the final destination of the cargo. Nevertheless, the ability of an airport to attract cargo routing by agents where there are alternative airports to satisfy their cargo delivery purpose needs to be studied extensively. The competition for cargo traffic handling and its connection to the airport choice of cargo agents operations is the focus of this study. The study of Gardiner (2006) found the location and presence of freight forwarders (cargo agents) as part of airport characteristics identified to be attracting cargo airlines to an airport. This underscores the importance of cargo agents operations at any airport. To this end, this study is an effort to find out why cargo agents prefer to operate at an airport at the expense of the other withcompetitive traffic demand.

The paper is structured such that Section 1 handles the introduction; Section 2 is a focus on literature, while Section 3 described the study area; Section 4 gives the details of data and methods adopted for the study while Section 5 deals with the presentation of results and discussion; and Section 6 presents the policy recommendation and conclusion.