Airglades International Airport

The mainstay of the project will be a new Perishable Cargo Complex which will be completely temperature-controlled and have different modules and chambers to accommodate different types of commodities. As Rentz explains, “Tropical fruit for example has to be stored at a different temperature than asparagus, flowers, seafood, etc. There are specific temperature ranges that are required by some of the retail giants and if the produce arrives at their warehouse that is not within the required range they will get rejected. We want to make sure that cold chain stays intact.” She adds, “Coming to Airglades would also eliminate a lot of the “touches”– a lot of the handling of commodities happened off-airport at different cold refrigerated warehouses in Miami owned by many different companies. Because much of the storage is off-site, to get out of Miami International could take up to a week. We are proposing somewhere between a four-to- eight-hour turnaround and that would increase the amount of shelf life for these time and temperature sensitive commodities. There will also be additional warehouse and refrigerated space at the airport if some of these importers or growers need to further manipulate the product. Flowers, for example, when they arrive may need to be broken down and then placed into bouquets.” Another factor in their favor is that Airglades exists along already established trucking and logistics routes. Truckers were some of the first people that were approached when thinking about what might be possible. Miami not only has a lot of traffic congestion but also adds about 200 miles to the round trip for the cargo trucks. At a shipping cost of $2.35 per mile, that adds up. Part of the new airport design includes a truck staging area to accommodate the parking and the truck traffic that is going to be coming into the airport. A I RGLADES INTERNAT IONAL A I RPORT Hernan Galindo, VP of Business Development Marilyn DeVoe, VP of Operations