Business continues to grow at Mercury Air Cargo, despite the frustratingly stagnant amount of airport warehouse space designated for cargo operations at each of its airports – San Jose, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

According to Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President John Peery, at the Los Angeles airport, where Mercury Air Cargo occupies 455,000 square feet of the 2 million square feet of the warehouse space, “The investment that the city of Los Angeles has made into the airport – over $13 billion on the passenger side – zero dollars are going into cargo warehouse development,” he said. Despite the fact that there are 14 new carriers flying into the airport since the beginning of 2016, there are no firm plans for cargo infrastructure improvements at LAX in the near term, Peery said.

The space constraints are similar at the airports in San Jose and San Francisco, but Mercury Air Cargo continues to grow in spite of the limited space.

The company has retained all of its customers because of the consistent level of service provided by Mercury employees.  They added another carrier, Ethiopian Airlines, to the Los Angeles roster in August, with four flights a week between Los Angeles, Dublin and Addis Ababa. They also began operating a freighter, out of Zaragoza, Spain, to Mexico City to Los Angeles, Peery reports. Beginning in November, Mercury Air Cargo will handle four passenger flights for the airline as well.

 “If we can spread out the operations throughout the full day, with varied flight times, arrivals and departures, it makes for a much more manageable environment than for things to crescendo at a certain time of the day,” he said. The trick, Peery says, “In our business, we don’t want everyone to go to the lunch counter at twelve.”

“We're not full; we do have room for organic and acquired growth,” Peery said.

Mercury Air Cargo will also begin handling daily services for Hong Kong Air with an A-350 aircraft in December. Flight frequency will also increase for British Airways and ANA in late October, both will go from two to three services daily out of Los Angeles.