Chaos with Beijing Ground Services at Beijing Capital Airport
Freightplus has been advised to avoid booking air cargo with any airlines that use Beijing Ground Services (BGS) as
their ground handling agent.
There is a risk that clients of BGS will suffer big delays and also huge financial losses. Already now many companies in Northern China are running
out of raw materials/components respectively spare parts and production lines are down.
Some two weeks ago one of the airline handling agents at Beijing Capital Airport, BGS, relocated their handling facilities and also appointed a new service
provider, namely Sheng Tong (ST), to handle the unloading of the aircrafts, temporary storage at the BGS bonded area and
transfer of cargo to the bonded warehouses of the consignees stated on the MAWB.
Unfortunately neither BGS nor ST seem to have done an effective job in preparing for this move.
All the agents using airlines that appointed BGS as their ground handling agent are facing tremendous delays in receiving
the shipments to their bonded facilities respectively cannot start performing the customs clearance. Currently the delay is
at least 7 days and every day it is getting worse.
The entire BGS warehouse is a mess, the open storage space which is also bonded is full with cargo and even cargo is
placed outside the fenced area (non bonded). The chaos with cargo just placed anywhere has spread over more than one
square kilometre! There is no recording system as to where cargo is positioned and as such nobody knows where
specific shipments can be found.
BGS have now opened the bonded facilities to all the agents who are looking for shipments. Hence, employees from numerous freight companies are walking all over the
place trying to find their shipments. A fellow GPLN member spent many hours out there to find a shipment of 5 tonnes consisting of 19
pallets and came back dirty, tired and frustrated late last night as she could only find 14 of them. She advised that some smaller
packages have even been thrown into the rubbish bin and that many parcels which actually would need to be protected from rain are
simply out in the open without any protection.
As there is no solution in sight, one can only imagine the dimension of the disaster that is going to "hit" us after the Chinese New
Year holidays since many of the workers / employees are simply leaving their jobs to go back to their hometowns to celebrate the
Holidays with their families.
The alternative is Air China Ground Handling (AC). With AC, things continue to work relatively smoothly.
The following carriers use AC:
005-CO, 006-DL, 008-GE, 014-AC, 016-UA, 020-LH, 043-KA, 045-LA, 077-MS,
080-LO, 081-QF, 086-NZ, 096-IR, 105-AY,
117-SK, 120-JS, 126-GA, 131-JL, 132-MX, 139-AM, 157-QR, 180-KE, 182-MA,
214-PK, 217-TG, 229-KU, 255-FG, 257-OS,
281-RO, 289-OM, 297-CI, 324-SC, 352-A7, 406-UP, 479-ZH, 507-SU, 512-RJ,
539-TH, 543-9Q, 555-SU, 688-EG, 706-KQ,
724-LX, 731-MF, 738-VN, 781-MU, 865-M7, 870-VV, 873-6R, 933-KZ, 988-OZ,
999-CA
For the time being, we have been advised to avoid using any other carrier than those stated here.