P2F(Passenger To Freighter)Aircraft Conversion Market Heating Up

Would you like to haul live crabs from Alaska to Japan? The tankage and plumbing involved in keeping the crabs alive kinda rules out any chance for a back haul but if you register in a third world country and get staff that have been fired from other carriers you can keep your costs down. This is an actual response a friend of mine got when he was pimping for an air freight company.
The response came from Nigeria. Really, it did.

 

LOL...there you go. Certain kinds of cargo don't take up much room at all. They can, however ruin your social activities for the next 15 to 25 tears.
Before California started growing a lot of pot most of the weed used to come out of Mexico. It was kinda like the old prohibition rum runner days. Nobody got too excited and hardly anybody got hurt. A gentleman's game, if you will.
That all changed when coke started coming in. That was a whole different cast of characters and there was nothing gentlemanly about them. Like a friend of mine who got out of it said..."When the best thing that could happen to you was getting arrested in the United States as opposed to being disappeared in Columbia it makes you think a little harder if the money is worth it".
A guy I worked with disappeared running coke. Nobody knows where or how but one day he just wasn't around any more and in the twenty years since he hasn't turned up. Last seen he was headed south in a Aero Commander to pick up a load. No sign of the plane either.

 

That's kind of what we figured. Those countries aren't under any obligation to let us know what they do. Another scenario is that the people he was hauling for got nervous about him for one reason or another and got rid of him.
Any way you cut it, they weren't the kind of people you could work for and feel good about it.

 

DOLE banana loads from Ecuador to anywhere USA.
Backhauls is empty or very sporadic Ecuador imports.
DOLE wants to skip the unreliable USA west coast ports and the boats moving their fruit loads.

 

In all seriousness is there a "spot market" and freight brokers for air freight like there is for trucks?

 

Yup. It's a little harder to get your foot in the door though. It's just as cut throat competitive as trucking, maybe more so. I know a couple of people that fly non-sched freight and they go all over the world.
One of them flys a 747 freighter for Atlas. We've had a running joke going on for years...
Him...Hey Terry, where you been and what you been doing?
Me....Let's see, Red Bluff, Corning, Chico, Quincy, Oroville....you know, same old boring stuff. Where you been?
Him...Oh, same old boring stuff for me too.... New York, London, Rome, Saigon, Paris, San Francisco...all the usual places..