After years of trying and more than 40 trade delegations, St. Louis is set to land its first Chinese cargo flight later this month, Mayor Francis Slay told the Post-Dispatch.A China Eastern Boeing 777 from Shanghai is tentatively scheduled to touch down at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport on the afternoon of Sept. 23, the mayor said. It’s the most concrete sign yet of progress in the region’s nearly four-year bid to turn its underused airport into a international freight hub.That first flight will be historic,Slay said.It’s the start of what we hope will be a long and mutually beneficial relationship.

The news could not be independently confirmed with China Eastern, but the airline has been negotiating with Lambert since January and in July sent a technical team to meet with freight companies in St. Louis. The airport and airline are hoping to sign a two-year lease on a cargo hangar as soon as this week, Lambert director Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge said.

For now, one flight will land here each week, though Slay said that China Eastern hoped to grow that to three weekly flights during the busy pre-holiday shipping season. Growth from there largely depends on Lambert’s ability to attract freight forwarders — the firms that route cargo from factory to final destination and on building a bigger network of flights and suppliers over time.

That depends largely on the $360 million Aerotropolis tax credits that will be at the center of this week’s special session of the Missouri Legislature, according to Slay and other cargo hub backers. The measure provides subsidies for freight forwarders to export from Lambert, and establishes new tax credits to build warehouses and other facilities around the airport. Slay and others say the bill is essential to draw the investment that will fuel a hub.
If we don’t get Aerotropolis, neither we nor the Chinese believe this route is going to succeed,said Slay.To make this whole effort successful, we need to have a true hub, and one or two or three flights a week is not a hub.

Building a hub from scratch is hard, cargo industry analysts say. Most forwarders prefer operating through big gateway airports such as Chicago O’Hare, where they have more options to ship their goods overseas. Those airports have infrastructure in place and big forwarders already operating there.All that conspires against Lambert’s efforts, said Michael Webber, a Kansas City-based cargo consultant who has watched the Aerotropolis debate.I wish them all the best,said Webber, who has worked in the past for O’Hare but says his opinions on this are his own. “But this plan just doesn’t hold any water.Still, city officials say, the only way to start is small.It’s not yet clear what will fly on those first few planes, but Hamm-Niebruegge said Lambert freight forwarders were working with China Eastern to book space. Having actual planes coming and going will make the route much easier to sell to the shipping industry.

This makes it real,said Jeff Rainford, Slay’s chief of staff.If it can fill its planes, China Eastern won’t pay much for the privilege of flying via Lambert. The airport’s standard incentive package for international flights waives landing fees and facility rental charges — in this case just under $175,000 a year  for the first 18 months. If Aerotropolis passes, it also will lower the costs to freight forwarders by as much as 35 cents a kilogram (2.2 pounds) for exports.That last piece, supporters say, will help get goods flying, not just west but east as well. And that, said Slay, is important to the real goal of all this: generating jobs in St. Louis.We need to put American-made goods on flights back to Shanghai,he said.That’s what’s going to make this route successful.