Every year, on the last Sunday of October, the global flight timetable turns over. This winter season opened on 26 October, and the air cargo headlines around it read like a growth story: Air Canada Cargo adding transatlantic and Latin American freighters, Lufthansa Cargo expanding across Asia-Pacific, carriers from Tokyo to Dubai bolting on frequencies. More metal, more lanes, more capacity.
And yet the email a forwarder quietly dreads is already landing, the one that trims the pallet count on a favourite flight from three to two. Winter rarely subtracts capacity outright. It moves it. The net picture can look healthy while the capacity you actually relied on migrates to a different route, a different carrier, or a different shipper. Reading where it went is the whole job.
Winter reshuffles the deck every year
The seasonal changeover is a feature, not a one-off. When the winter passenger timetable comes in, airlines thin frequencies on some routes and belly-hold capacity contracts with them, exactly the space that general freight leans on. Carriers answer by repositioning freighters toward the lanes where winter demand concentrates, which is why a season that adds aircraft can still leave individual shippers short on the specific flight they had planned around.
The timing compounds it. As one forwarder told The Loadstar, “You get the winter schedules maybe six, eight, ten weeks in advance”, and only then does the scramble to renegotiate allocations begin, with forwarders competing against each other for the same repositioned space.
The freighters are arriving in force
The additions this winter are real and broad-based. Across the major carriers:
- Air Canada Cargo is deploying its Boeing 767 freighters into the transatlantic winter gap, with Toronto to Amsterdam launching twice weekly from 29 October, Monterrey three times weekly from 26 October, and Panama City up to twice weekly from 25 October, building Europe to Latin America routings via Toronto that also reach Quito, Lima, Bogotá and Mexico City.
- Lufthansa Cargo’s winter schedule, effective 25 October, runs 88 freighter routes serving 40 destinations, with up to 46 weekly rotations to 17 Asia-Pacific destinations and US frequency increases to Dallas/Fort Worth (four weekly), Houston (three) and New York JFK (five).
- Air France-KLM Martinair Cargo has added Paris to Cairo at three weekly B777F flights and Amsterdam to Seoul at three weekly.
- JAL has layered on codeshare freighter capacity out of Tokyo Narita, Los Angeles twice weekly with Atlas Air (from 2 October), Chicago six weekly with Kalitta Air, Luxembourg twice weekly with Cargolux, and Dalian once weekly on its own 767F.
- Cathay Cargo is putting additional Americas freighter capacity into the peak on the back of semiconductor and data-centre equipment demand, with a leased A330 converted freighter expected in Q4, operated by Air Hong Kong.
- Emirates SkyCargo has added seven weekly South American freighter flights since March, including Buenos Aires, Bogotá, São Paulo and Quito.
For a Benelux shipper the map is especially busy close to home: Amsterdam alone picks up a new transatlantic freighter rotation from Air Canada and a fresh Amsterdam to Seoul frequency from AF-KLM.
But the belly is moving the other way
Set against the freighter build-up is the quieter winter contraction in passenger belly-hold. The headline numbers still read as growth, IATA put global air cargo demand up 4.4% year on year in August, against capacity down 0.1%, with Asia to North America capacity demand up 13.2%, but those averages hide the redistribution underneath. Capacity is not falling; it is relocating to where carriers see winter demand, which is not necessarily where a given shipper’s freight needs to be.
That is the trap in a growth headline. “Up 4.4%” is cold comfort to a shipper whose Europe-to-US lane just lost a rotation while new frequencies pile into the transpacific.
Why forwarders are opening unwelcome emails
This is where the reshuffle becomes concrete. As airlines redistribute space to match the winter schedule, allocations get rewritten, sometimes abruptly. “Sometimes they say, ‘hey, you have three pallets on that flight, now you can only have two’,” one forwarder told The Loadstar, describing Europe-to-US replacement capacity as “a little bit of a challenge.” Asian procurement held up better, cushioned by year-round block-space agreements rather than left exposed to the seasonal churn.
The cost side is turning over at the same time. Carriers have been resetting surcharges into the season: MSC Air Cargo lifted its surcharge from 16 October (from $1.70/€1.70 to $2.30/€2.30 per chargeable kilogram, around 35%), JAL raised its Japan-origin long-haul fuel surcharge from 16 October, and Air Canada Cargo increased surcharges from 26 October, citing Middle East unrest, fuel prices and airport fees. So the winter changeover hits a shipper twice: the space moves, and the price of what remains moves with it.
What this means if you are shipping this winter
A growth season and a tight shipment are not a contradiction, they are the normal texture of winter. The question is never “is there capacity?” in the aggregate; it is “is there capacity on my lane, on my day, at a rate I can defend, after the schedule turned over and the allocations were rewritten?” That answer changes flight by flight.
This is precisely where neutrality earns its keep. A carrier can only sell you its own repositioned schedule and its own allocation; a forwarder tied to block space on one network is defending that space first. A neutral broker holds no aircraft, no hub and no allocation to protect, which means it can read the entire reshuffled map at once, the new freighter rotations, the thinned belly, the surcharge resets, the gateways that just gained or lost a frequency, and match each shipment to live capacity rather than to last season’s plan.
The bottom line
Winter 2026/27 is adding freighters, not cutting them, but it is moving capacity faster than many shippers will move their plans. The carriers building new rotations are telling you where they expect the freight to be; the allocation emails are telling you it will not land evenly. The shippers who treat the changeover as a moment to re-check every lane, rather than a headline to skim, will be the ones who still have space when it counts.
At ACC, that re-check is the service. Tell us where your freight needs to be this winter, and we will weigh every carrier, gateway and freighter against your lane and your timeline, and keep your options open while the schedule settles.
Sources: The Loadstar, “Airlines strengthen winter freighter links, as forwarders face capacity shuffle” (20 October 2026) · Air Cargo Week, “First fortnight of October sees rates hold steady” (20 October 2026) · IATA air cargo market analysis (August 2026) · Air Canada Cargo / Lufthansa Cargo winter 2026/27 schedule announcements (October 2026)
