They were only mollified when management gave them a guarantee that they could remain SAS employees. Maneuvering of this kind will probably increase in the cargo market in the future, says Paul Jackson, chief executive of British consultants Triangle Management Services. He sees lots of current developments in the context of increased frustration about traffic rights. This labeling approach is a sort of creeping deregulation of freighter traffic rights, and I think the authorities will turn a blind eye to it. Thomas Crabtree, regional director airline market analysis cargo at Boeing, agrees.
Bilateral constraints are unfair given the international trading scheme.
Airlines will probably get away with such sleights of hand because consolidation in the sector is widely seen as inevitable. Vertical integration between carriers and forwarders is more controversial, however. In contrast to the highly-publicized comments by KLM in the 1990s, Lufthansa is studied in its ambiguity even as it moves more closely to the issue. Jansen says he is not sure if integration with Deutsche Post and DHL into a single large entity will be the way forward, or whether the more multi-faceted cooperation represented by Lufthansa's Business Partnership scheme with forwarders will be prevalent. It may be one system, or it may be a series of flexible alliances, with forwarders, postal services, airlines and express operators competing for some customers, and working together on others.