Australian Air Freight Summit launches at Avalon

AMDA Foundation will launch the inaugural Australian Air Freight Summit at Avalon Australian International Airshow 2027, creating a dedicated national forum for airports, freight forwarders, customs specialists, logistics operators, government, and businesses using air cargo.

The summit is being developed with input from across the freight sector and will run as part of the trade programme at Avalon Airport in Victoria. Avalon Airport has been confirmed as the first major partner, while Freight and Trade Alliance will act as programme delivery partner.

Current event information lists the summit across Wednesday 24 and Thursday 25 February 2027. The wider Australian International Airshow runs from 23 to 28 February, placing air freight within an event that already draws participants from aviation, aerospace, manufacturing, government, and related technology sectors.

Justin Giddings, Chief Executive Officer of AMDA Foundation, said the summit would extend Avalon’s platform into a sector “that is increasingly important to Australia’s trade future”. The new forum gives freight its own programme rather than treating cargo as a secondary part of a broader aviation agenda.

That distinction matters because the aircraft is only one element in an air freight supply chain. Cargo moves through manufacturers, exporters, forwarders, road transport, airport terminals, security and customs processes, ground handlers, airline networks, destination gateways, and onward distribution before completing the journey.

Increasing capacity in one part of that chain can simply transfer congestion elsewhere. Additional aircraft lift delivers limited benefit if freight waits for screening, border clearance, warehouse space, handling equipment, documentation, or a road connection after arriving at the terminal.

Avalon Airport’s position as the first major partner gives the summit a direct connection with physical gateway infrastructure. Airports have to balance passenger and freight requirements while providing road access, secure cargo handling, apron capacity, storage, screening, and specialist facilities for goods such as perishables or temperature sensitive healthcare products.

Freight and Trade Alliance adds the forwarding and customs perspective. Its members operate close to the administrative interfaces that determine whether cargo can actually move, covering areas such as customs declarations, trade compliance, documentation, capacity procurement, border processes, and coordination between shippers, carriers, and terminals.

Paul Zalai, Director and Co-Founder of Freight and Trade Alliance, said the event would recognise freight forwarders and customs brokers as the professionals connecting Australian businesses with global markets. That representation is useful because air cargo performance is frequently discussed in terms of airport or airline capacity even when the delay sits in information or regulatory processes.

Australia’s geography makes those interfaces particularly important. Manufacturers, exporters, and importers operate at considerable distance from major overseas markets, while domestic supply chains also cover long distances between population, production, and resource centres. Air transport is expensive compared with sea or road freight, but it becomes economically important when the goods are sufficiently urgent, valuable, perishable, or disruptive to hold in inventory.

The National Freight Data Hub projects Australian air freight volume to increase by 103% between 2020 and 2050. The underlying forecast concerns Australia’s domestic freight task, so it should not be read as a direct forecast of international cargo throughput at Avalon or other airports. It nevertheless illustrates the expected direction of demand for a transport mode that remains small by physical volume but important for high value and time sensitive movements.

Air freight therefore creates an unusual capacity problem. It represents only a tiny share of overall freight tonnage, yet interruptions can have an outsized effect on particular supply chains. An urgent production component, pharmaceutical shipment, high value industrial product, parcel, or perishable export can carry commercial consequences far beyond its physical weight.

For manufacturers, this often makes air cargo a resilience tool rather than the default mode. Businesses may use sea freight for normal replenishment and switch selected consignments to air when production schedules tighten, inventory is disrupted, a launch deadline approaches, or a replacement part is required urgently.

That role makes visibility and coordination as important as raw capacity. A shipper needs to know whether an aircraft booking, customs release, connecting service, road collection, or specialist handling requirement will prevent the shipment from meeting its deadline. Better data exchange can reduce that uncertainty, but only where the organisations involved can share compatible and trusted information.

The summit consequently has a wider agenda available to it than airport expansion or airline schedules. Customs digitisation, cargo security, workforce capability, terminal automation, freight forwarding, ground handling, road access, trade regulation, and infrastructure investment all influence the performance experienced by the company paying for an air shipment.

There is also a strategic question around how Australian gateways respond to changing trade patterns. Production networks are being redesigned around resilience, supplier diversification, and changing market access, while ecommerce and high value manufacturing create different cargo profiles from traditional bulk trade.

The organisers have not yet published the complete speaker and session programme, leaving the detailed content of the summit still to be settled. That makes the next stage important. A useful freight forum will need to move beyond general statements about growth and focus on specific operating constraints, data, investment requirements, and regulatory friction.

The opportunity is substantial because the participants needed to solve those problems rarely sit within one part of the industry. Airports cannot fix customs procedures alone, forwarders cannot create terminal capacity, airlines cannot resolve every road connection, and shippers cannot redesign gateway infrastructure individually.

Bringing those groups together does not guarantee that bottlenecks will disappear, but it gives Australian air freight a dedicated national setting in which the bottlenecks can at least be identified by the organisations responsible for different parts of the chain. With freight demand expected to grow, the value of the first Avalon summit will ultimately be measured by whether it turns that conversation into practical changes before additional volume reaches already constrained interfaces.