When David Bronczek, who runs the FedEx Corp's air operations, went out to get his newspaper on Friday morning, he found a note on his mailbox from a neighbor. "The most wonderful sound I've heard in a lot of years was the sound of your planes coming over my house last night," it read, "because it made everything seem right again."
Fifty-two hours after being grounded Tuesday, FedEx put its first plane back into the sky at 2pm Central time on Thursday; by early Friday, 150 white cargo jets with the company's purple and orange logo had sailed off into the skies over the company's primary hub here.
PHOTO: REUTERS
And though that was only about two-thirds of normal, the sound of those takeoffs had a special resonance for people in FedEx's hometown, as a sign that one of the nation's prime arteries of commerce was again flowing.
The company, which ships about 3.3 million packages every business day, has contingency plans to deal with slowdowns and delays all over the world, plans for coping with severe weather or various natural disasters. But resuming full-scale domestic operations from a complete grounding of its air fleet was new terrain.
For the first time since it started business in 1973 as an overnight delivery service, FedEx had to rely solely on trucks to keep its packages moving. It tripled the size of its truck fleet, to more than 950 trucks, by contracting with various trucking concerns.
FedEx had to put new security precautions into effect after Tuesday's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, including a tightening of security around its hubs here and in Newark, New Jersey; Indianapolis; Oakland, California; Anchorage, and Fort Worth, along with some smaller operation centers. But as an all-cargo airline, the requirements for FedEx were less complicated than those for passenger carriers, said Bronczek, the president and chief executive of the company's FedEx Express unit.
"We don't have passengers and we don't have anybody flying in our jumpseats for the moment, so it was easier for us to get up and running," he said. "Our cargo operation was actually ready to go a day earlier than we actually got released to go."
Though analysts said they thought that the economic effect of the grounding itself would not be significant for FedEx, this week may have given the company a taste of things to come.
"For the near term, because the airports were shut down, the impact of this on FedEx as a company was very much like a snowstorm," said Edward Wolfe, a transportation analyst at Bear Stearns. "But for the longer term the impact will be contingent on what regulations result from this incident. My gut tells me there will be more regulation across the board, so that could increase expenses."
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