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Cyclone Arnab brings more disruption along India's eastern coast

Vessel-handling services have been suspended or restricted across several major ports along India's east coast since Monday, due to Cyclone Arnab warnings. The severe storm made landfall on India's eastern coastline this morning, bringing huge swells and gale winds across the region, according to reports. One key gateway port that suspended all operations until further notice was Visakhapatnam, a critical feeder port for Maersk's coverage out of India's east coast, especially for cargo moving in and out of Kolkata. Kuehne+Nagel told customers: "Potentially impacted container ports include Visakhapatnam, Gangavaram, and Krishnapatnam, all of which have received cyclone or storm warnings as Arnab approaches India's east coast." Industry sources in India believe the port suspensions could inevitably cause congestion and delays to freight flow, but the scale will only be known when terminals fully reopen. "Visakhapatnam terminals are slowly getting back to business, in tandem with government guidelines and updates," one carrier official told The Loadstar. "The ports were told to keep operations suspended as part of contingency planning." According to the latest updates, the cyclonic storm claimed three lives in India's Andhra Pradesh State, in addition to causing extensive damage to residential properties and utility installations in the region. Several Indian ports had already been experiencing operational pressures due to widespread vessel bunching tied to delayed arrivals from Asian origin ports, and "the cyclone disruption is another blow to the supply chains", said a Visakhapatnam-based ship agent. Visakhapatnam handled 302,926 teu year-to-date through September, edging down from 308,861 teu year on year, according to data collected by The Loadstar. Meanwhile, the authorities in Bangladesh issued similar cautionary alerts for ports as the cyclone threatened gusty weather over the northern Bay of Bengal and adjoining coastal areas. "Cyclonic Storm Arnab has formed over the east-central and adjoining west-central Bay of Bengal and is forecast to intensify into a very severe cyclonic storm before making landfall along the Andhra Pradesh and Yanam coasts on 28 October," London-based port agency service provider Inchcape Shipping Services told customers. Congestion and operational disruption issues are not limited to the Indian coast. K+N also reported an average vessel waiting time of two days across terminals in Sri Lanka's Colombo port, "due to ongoing transhipment congestion, missed feeder connections, vessel omissions and routing changes", the company said.

Freighter conversions plug capacity gap but have limitations

Converted freighters play an important role in the air cargo industry's efforts to add more cargo capacity to the market, but they come with limitations, delegates were told at the TIACA Air Cargo Forum. During the "Freighter at the Forefront" panel session on Wednesday, Atlas Air's chief strategy and transformation officer Martin Drew asked how much of a role freighter conversions play in fleet replacement and bridging the capacity gap until the new generation Boeing 777-8F and Airbus A350F come to market. Bernard De L'Estoile, senior director of freighter marketing at Airbus, said that while converted freighters help fill a gap in the market, "they will not be ideal for everything and (for every operator) because they come with challenges, (they) come with limitations as well for operations". "It will only bring part of the solution," said De L'Estoile. "A converted freighter to me works well if the utilisation is low, because as soon as the utilisation is high then fuel burn kicks in, especially on long ranges. "Clearly a line built with its fuel economy will make the business case flip in towards a line-built aircraft. So for me the conversion isn't a sort of fit-all solution." Responding to the same question, John Perdoch, Boeing's director, product marketing - freighters pointed out the technology, fuel efficiency and cost advantages that a newbuild freighter has over a converted freighter. However, he conceded that given the current demand for widebodies, conversions are an obvious, practical solution. "We are in a supply shortage in this industry, especially in the large widebody space, and so it's natural for the industry to look for a way to bridge their fleets today into their future fleets, and naturally, we're going to think about how conversions play into that space." There are three widebody passenger-to-freighter (P2F) 777 conversion programmes in the market currently. Israel Aerospace Industries' (IAI) Boeing 777-300ERSF passenger-to-freighter (P2F) conversion programme was first to market. The first converted aircraft entered commercial service in September last year and more recently, IAI, Ascent Aviation Services and World Star Aviation announced the commencement of Boeing 777-300ERSF passenger-to-freighter (P2F) conversions in North America. Meanwhile, in April, Mammoth Freighters received Supplemental Type Certification (STC) from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for its 777-200LRMF (Long Range Mammoth Freighter) freighter conversion. The company continues to make progress on its 777-300ERMF programme and expects FAA certification of that variant this year. Kansas Modification Center (KMC) announced in January it had reached a cargo door milestone and expected to begin flight testing and the supplemental type certificate (STC) process for its 777-300ERCF freighter conversion programme in the third quarter. Speaking about the current 777 conversions, Perdoch said that they are a natural stepping stone to the 777-8F, given their operational similarities, which will also be helpful for crew and ground handlers. "I actually think it's a super smooth transition from today's fleet, which adds much-needed capacity in the state of the market. Maybe not quite as much payload, not quite as low a fuel burn as a newbuild. But they're 100-ton freighters. That's a pretty good capacity to add to the market, and we think there's absolutely a place for it in (the industry)." Aside from 777s, aviation advisory firm IBA noted earlier this year that Boeing 767, Airbus A330-200 and A330-300 conversions are also in demand.

AI in logistics: where it's real and where it's noise

The most common misconception about AI in logistics is that it's a magic button. If it were, the average operator's day would look very different two years into the AI wave. But it doesn't, and the portal-hopping, the chasing, the manual reconciling are mostly still there. That gap, between the noise about AI and the reality on the operations floor, is worth being honest about, because it shows where AI has created real value and where it's still just noise. First, AI is real in the boring work. It helps most when it takes repeatable, daily work off the operator. Freight runs on messy documents that aren't designed for machines to read: the PDFs, rate sheets, and carrier contracts that come in every format, each with its own rules. AI is very good at reading that mess and turning it into something a tech system can act on. One shipper we worked with was receiving freight invoices from 9 different carriers in more than 100 formats. Even the same carrier office would send invoices in different formats. Once we read them automatically, 55% showed discrepancies against freight agreements and actual container movements. Finding these discrepancies with AI is where the real impact comes from. People are one of the biggest costs in a forwarding business, so every hour saved from manual reconciliation and every overcharge caught before it's paid shows up directly on the P&L. None of the AI use-cases work without clean data. Every forwarder I talk to already knows this, and most still underestimate it. A single shipment carries thousands of data points across operational, financial, and commercial files. If those are wrong, the AI still answers confidently, just wrongly, and you find out when your customer does. When I talk about data, I mean combining external data like shipment visibility, sailing schedules, service reliability, and tradelane risks with internal data like order-level information, contract terms, and customer SLAs. Once the data foundation is set up and clean, AI can produce insights and recommendations. The other critical thing that separates the AI that adds value from the AI that fades a few weeks after launch is user adoption. A model can be good, but if the people meant to use it don't understand or trust it, they will work around it and revert to their own spreadsheets and gut feeling. The AI that proves its value is the one operators reach for on their own because it fits how they already work. And finally, when we talk about AI, it's human-in-the-loop, instead of fully automated. Freight is complex, and there are real legal and financial consequences when something goes wrong. For anything that touches a customer or the P&L, a person stays in the loop, reviews the AI's recommendation, and makes the final call. The model that works is hybrid: the AI does the scanning and drafting; the operator keeps the judgment. In a business this complex, that is the one worth continuing, at least in the near term. That's the test behind our three AI agents at Portcast: each one has to save real time or cut real cost, which is why there are three concrete ones, not a hundred agents. The Daily Agent reviews every shipment overnight and hands each operator one ranked brief of what changed, what needs a decision, and where demurrage is building. It cuts morning triage from about 45 minutes to 10, roughly 152 hours a year per operator, and because it catches demurrage while the free time is still on the clock, it reduces costs before they occur. Take the booking decision. Every booking makes an operator weigh many conflicting data points at once to choose what's right for the customer and what's right for the business, and at scale, that's almost impossible to do well. So, operators fall back on habit, and the call ends up based on a guess rather than the data. Our Route Planning Agent handles that decision across what matters: schedule reliability, price, allocation agreements, and live disruptions, and the operator decides which counts most. You get a process that scales, with customers booked on the services that fit their priorities, and steadier service because of it. The Market Reliability Agent turns months of carrier performance into string-level evidence, including transshipment services, not just the port pair. Two services on the same port pair can behave completely differently. Teams use it to negotiate tenders and move volume to the carriers that actually deliver, and to price premium services on real performance rather than carrier claims. That is the cost taken out on the buy side and margin protected on the sell side. All three show their work, and none act without a person's sign-off. I also believe that not everything needs AI. If you can solve a problem with a clear set of rules and inputs, there is value in keeping it deterministic rather than adding AI simply because you can. So, is AI a magic button? No. It's a tool, and it is valuable when it clears real work off the desk and gives you back time or cuts costs, with a person still making the decisions that matter. If you're running an AI pilot right now, ask one question: what will my operators stop doing on Monday because of this?