Expect Boston lobster, New York cheesecake, maybe even genuine Big Apple burgers, to be appearing on the menus of Nanjing’s upscale restaurants in the coming weeks, as facilitated by an American cargo flight operator and its new flight to and from the USA.
It was in the very early hours of yesterday, 11 July, that the Sky Lease Cargo Boeing 747 departed Nanjing Lukou International Airport en route to New York.
Flight GG4864, with 99 tonnes of cargo on board, out of a 128.5-tonne maximum capacity for the B747-400 freighter, marked the official opening of the international all-cargo route between Nanjing and New York.
Except that a Jumbo Jet cannot fly non stop between the two cities; it’s simply too far. A stopover in Anchorage gave the jet the chance to spend 2 hours on Alaskan tarmac to refuel, as well as to pick up and drop off more cargo.
After it got back in the air, the flight then landed in John F. Kennedy International Airport at 12:06 local New York time, just in time for lunch.
But Boston lobster was not on that particular menu. That is what will be coming in the other direction, for us here in Nanjing to savour. Joining that on board shall be other aquatic produce, reports the Yangtze Evening News.
Going into JFK, the flight from Nanjing brought various items of that termed “cross-border e-commerce cargo”; that we can take to mean some of the stuff made in China that Americans have been snapping up online recently.
The cargo service, that is planned to fly three times each week, is a welcome addition to air transportation between the Yangtze River Delta and the Americas.
Sky Lease Cargo is an American air-freighter lease company based in Miami, Florida, USA. The firm at present operates a fleet of just two aircraft, both of them Boeing 747s.
