With a little help from our friends (at Delta)

by logisticsplus | May 6, 2020 | News

To All (from our CEO),

Well, Megan, Yuriy and I got to the Detroit airport yesterday evening just in time to meet our first Delta Cargo charter I mentioned yesterday, arriving with a full plane load of PPE masks and other items for various American customers we’re delivering for. Awesome!

We actually arrived at the Same Exact Time as the charter did (thank you, John and Hallie : ) and we met it on the tarmac as it headed into the gate. (Logistics, baby! ?)

Incredible effort by all—Eileen and her team in China, Russel in Houston, Kelly, Megan, G2 and others here in Erie.

The ground crew quickly jumped to work and the entire plane was unloaded in 45 minutes.

Colleen was a most delightful hostess and took us to watch the entire process, and then to the Delta warehouse where we met Mohammed, who runs it. They were glad for the business (Detroit airport looked like a ghost town—sad). Both were upbeat and hopeful, even in a hotspot like Detroit, that we are at least beginning to emerge from all this and will be getting back to more normal business soon.

This could not have been possible without the help/hopefully fledgling partnership with Delta Airlines.

Unless you have been intimately involved in trying to book these charters, as Eileen and Russell and Yuriy and Kelly and Megan and G2 have, you really cannot fully understand how impossibly crazy it’s been. And not just “business is harder now because of the pandemic” tough. This has been WAY beyond that.

—Trying to place orders for product in China, where the demand has soared
—Manufacturers canceling promised orders
—Quality control
—Varying, very specific certifications required by customers/governments
—Other parties buying out/stealing orders that were being produced for us.
—Russell dealing with new rules, changes, cancellations of flights
—Trucks waiting in lines MILES long trying to deliver product to the airport.
—Chinese customs changing their export rules.
—US customs changing our import rules.
—Ground crews in China overwhelmed with the volume of cargo and planes.
—China changing rules regarding planes/crews/quarantines
—Eileen spending 24 hours straight at the Shanghai airport to help make sure our cargo all got loaded (onto the RIGHT airplane : )
—And on and on and on.

And, whatever issues that WE/LP have been dealing with—Delta and the other airlines, had to deal with them, and many, many more (they are the actual OPERATORS in this picture!) Total chaos and constant changing, sometimes by the hour. Total Wild West.

And that’s amidst this time when airlines are already getting economically crushed by this pandemic. Tough, tough, tough.

So, it’s been very heartening that we have been able to work so closely with Delta (my favorite airlines) with a little help from many of their top leadership, from Ed Bastian, their CEO, through their corporate leadership, and right down to the front line troops like Mohammad and Colleen.

If you have ever flown Delta, you know of the superior customer service and attention they provide. It was no different here. They, like us, know that even in tough times, you need to treat each other right. You find the patience and the creativity and the mental toughness and the resilience to navigate through, and they did. (The old John Wooden quote: “Tough times does not build character, it reveals character”.

A good and positive experience for our LP team, and a terrific result for our customers who will today be getting the masks and other personal protective equipment they ordered through us delivered to them. Success!

So, thank you, Ed, Shawn, Eric, Arthur, Mohammad and Colleen. Thank you from me, from LP, from our customers and from those who will now be able to feel safer and more secure as “inch by inch” we/all of us, continue to get through this awful mess. Thank you.

Onward! (with a little help from our friends… : )

JB

Jim Berlin, CEO, Logistics Plus

(click any of the three photos above to see larger version)