Posted 02/15/2005
AACA Named Best Air Cargo Club of 2004
(Reprinted from Air Cargo News December 2004 / January 2005)
The question of who has the best air cargo club is arguably where you are at the moment.
For example if you have little budget or attention span for high-profile, golf allegro-driven affairs, that need several changes of costume just to get to the point, then your best air cargo club may be going on just across the street from the airport at monthly meetings.
On the other hand if your sales and marketing message includes lots of flash money for your product or service, then maybe these stalwart organizations of local business, cargo sales reps and esteemed old-timers in the business, are just not enough, let alone your cup of tea.
But we admit in our 30 plus years of covering air cargo - nothing, and we mean nothing, beats the local air cargo clubs.
There's a good one at Baltimore Washington International Airport called BWACA.
Chicago, the city of broad shoulders has a great air cargo club too.
In Frankfurt, ACD pulls together the top cargo and passenger gateway in Europe, as does the Honolulu Club out there in paradise.
An Air Cargo Club is one place in our industry that offers an immediate reception and unfettered access.
Club meetings usually have an open welcome for regulars, campers and fellow travelers, who may be far away from home and office, stuck in a hotel when the air cargo club meets at the Holiday Inn Crown Plaza, or when across the Imperial Highway at the Hacienda Hotel in Los Angeles, the LAX Air Cargo Association gets it on.
So maybe there is no "best" air cargo club after all because deep down we think they are all great.
We think that if the Atlanta Air Cargo Association is not the best air cargo club in the world, it will have to do, until the real thing comes along.
 |
| From left to right -- David Carruthers, Air Cargo, Inc.; Rachel Worley FedEx; Kevin Madden, Euro-Cargo; Dawn Griggs, Air Sea Forwarders; and Beverly Horan, AZ Atlanta. |
No fooling.
Atlanta has a great airport where the runways seem to go on forever and you can look up in the sky and watch dual tracks of airplanes taking off and landing all day long.
Atlanta also has an air cargo club that is heart and soul of the air cargo business there, with a large and active membership that not only spends a year-long effort to bring the community together, but also gives monies to local learning institutions, creates transportation scholarships, helps members with online job fairs, and otherwise lifts the form of air cargo better than anywhere else in the world.
We are sitting on one of the top floors of the Marriott Hotel near the airport in Atlanta
The speaker is thanking AACA membership for bestowing another $2500 of the club's hard-earned money raised at various charity events and golf outings for a logistics scholarship fund at a local university.
But this AACA as you read this has scholarship endowments at three different colleges that it is funding, bringing quality higher education to others as the new century unfolds.
The luncheon is spread out across a dozen tables that are filled with airline and airport people, truckers, brokers, folks looking for a job, a couple of senior folks and some secretaries.
Outside a window wall that runs the length of the room in the near distance are the runways of the airport the bag tags say is ATL.
While the speaker rolls on, airplanes are moving about and landing and taking off in a majestic sweep.
What a scene!
Later most of these people will return to a dozen office parks or cubby offices, going back to their computer screens and warehouses at air cargo buildings and centers around Atlanta.
But for now the airport is laid out like a string of pearls below the strawberry topped cheesecake encircling the tables.
What an uplifting experience.
Every air cargo club should meet with some kind of strong aviation motif we are thinking.
After all aren't airports and airplanes why we all got into this business in the first place?
So AACA has location, plus a booming air cargo business, and is a concerned responsible involved organized air cargo club at work.
It also has some very dedicated people.
If you think about it, today most clubs and organizations in our business hang by just a few people.
Jerry Kash and Jim Larsen in New York; Dhannon Deskin at BWIA, Bill Conrad and Ernesto Schimmer and others in Los Angeles, you know the drill.
Here's to those few hard workers, wherever in the world, that keep the notices moving, while beating the drum for air cargo clubs everywhere.
At AACA it's Harold Hagans, Atlanta Customs Brokers and Robert Kennedy, HJ Int'l Airport, and (pictured here) Dawn Griggs, Air Sea Forwarders, Beverly Horan, AZ Atlanta, Rachel Worley FedEx, David Carruthers, Air Cargo, Inc. and Kevin Madden and some other people we probably should have mentioned.
But as you look at these faces you are also looking at yourself because these people like you are out to make our air cargo business better.
It is with pride and honor that Air Cargo News names the Atlanta Air Cargo Association - 2004 Air Cargo Club of the Year.