Qatar poised to open Doha chill hub

Qatar Airways is to open a transit hub for temperature-controlled shipments at its Doha hub at Hamad International Airport.
The carrier, which also announced a new freighter service to London Heathrow at the Air Cargo Europe event in Munich (see story) said the new Climate Control Centre in Doha would be a 2,470sq m airside transit facility with zones operating at 2°- 8°C and 15°- 25°C with space for 156 ULDs.
There would be segregated good distribution practice’ (GDP)-compliant sections for pharmaceuticals and, to ensure complete temperature integrity, the six truck docks would have inflated curtains and an ante-room as a staging area.
Qatar Airways Cargo added a fourth weekly Basel-Doha, Pharma Express flight on 8 May, served by its Airbus A330 freighter, to cater for increased pharma demand.
Qatar Airways chief officer cargo, Ulrich Ogiermann said: “Europe is a major market for Qatar Airways Cargo, and we have expanded our operations immensely by increasing our freighter flights to the prime European cities such as Luxembourg, Liege and Brussels in recent months…Ultimately, we aspire to be the preferred cargo service provider to connect our customers’ businesses across the globe with quality and speed via our state-of-the-art Doha hub.”
Qatar is also to open a dedicated transit facility for courier and mail products at Doha. The 6,700sq m building will have a capacity for 256,000 tonnes annually, complete with screening, handling and storage areas. Meanwhile, the cargo terminal 2 (CT2) project is underway with phase 1 scheduled to be completed in 2021. This will have a builting area of 110,000sq m and boost the airline’s annual cargo capacity to 4.6 million tonnes from the current terminal’s annual capacity of 1.4 million tonnes.