The air cargo market is enormous and growing at a rapid clip. It’s a more stable industry than airline travel, includes package freight (like your second day air delivery from Amazon) as well as more traditional goods. Randy Baseler, VP of marketing for Boeing Commercial Aircraft, predicts that in the next twenty years the package and cargo market will double in size.

Already, FedEx Express has a fleet of almost 650 aircraft. They flew 14.5 million tonne-kilometers of package freight in 2004, much of it within US borders. In the same year, Cargolux – one of the larger ‘cargo’ carriers – moved 4.7 million tonne-kilometers with a fleet of 14 aircraft. The capabilities and requirements for each part of the market are drastically different, with bulky packages requiring much more space than denser cargo. Cargolux exclusively flies Boeing 747-400F freighters, with orders for ten of the recently announced 747-8F on the books (options for ten more). The first 747 stretch ever, the -8F pushes total capacity closer to the A380. Fedex, on the other hand, mostly operates widebodies like the Airbus A300 and narrower Boeing 727s.

There are basically two types of aircraft that work in the cargo market: 747 freighters and Russian heavy-lifters. 747s already carry around half the world’s air cargo by weight, and many Russian aircraft (particularly earlier examples of the Ilyushin Il-76) are banned from Western airspace because of noise and pollution regulations.

The package freight market has a lot more diversity – Airbus A300s and A310s are very common, as are a huge range of Boeing aircraft from the 727 to the 767. There are even around 60 or 70 elderly Douglas DC-8s serving reliably and efficiently with newer engines. Cargo airlines don’t necessarily need the newest or cleanest aircraft, they just need dependable ones that can turn a profit.

Boeing continues to sell new and rebuilt freighters in a product line that fills the entire spectrum; Airbus, on the other hand, is closing down the A300/A310 production line next year (though third-party freight conversions will likely continue). This will leave them with one new-build freighter: the A380F. That’s right, the only cargo aircraft they’ll sell new is gigantic, tailored only toward package freight, and (allegedly) suffering from delays and weight issues. The buyers that wanted freighter A380s – FedEx and UPS, for the most part – have enough, and nobody else is buying. With only standard side cargo doors, he A380F lacks any capacity for outsized goods like aircraft engines and vehicles – in fact, if an A380 itself needs a replacement engine, it has to be shipped in a 747 or an Antonov An-124!

This leaves me wondering what Airbus has on the back burner – there isn’t much talk in any publications about new freighter variants, despite the widening product gap. Airbus rarely introduces freighters at the same time as airliners – but a freighter based on the A350 could save them. It’s impossible to add a nose door to the A380 however – the deck layout and location of the cockpit rule that out. If Airbus does nothing, they cede the future of air cargo to Boeing, and even if they introduce a new aircraft they might wind up losing anyway.