After 21 years at AfA, Brandon Fried hands over a cargo industry in flux

Brandon Fried left the Airforwarders Association on 3 November after more than two decades leading the body through the construction of the US air cargo security regime. Steve Smith, former president and chief executive of the humanitarian logistics organisation Airlink, takes over an agenda Fried describes as no less demanding than the one he inherited.

Fried joined the AfA in 2000 and served two consecutive terms as chairperson from 2001. He became executive director in 2005, four years after the 9/11 attacks reshaped the regulatory landscape for every participant in the air freight chain.

What did 9/11 change for forwarders?

The attacks pushed aviation security to the centre of the AfA's work, and Fried found himself defending the sector's commercial interests in Congress.

"Some people in Congress wanted to pull cargo from passenger planes," he recalls. "We had to make sure the security regime would not cripple commerce while trying to make the skies safer."

He frames the shift bluntly. "Until 9/11 safety and security often times took a back seat. People didn't understand the terrorist threat until then. This changed with the inception of the TSA and the realisation that we're at the front lines. We realised that failure of our imagination is not permissible."

Fried spent long stretches on Capitol Hill, briefing lawmakers and their staff on how air cargo operates and what proposed security measures would actually do to trade flows. He became a go-to figure for the industry and one of its principal interlocutors with the Transportation Security Administration, present when the underlying legislation was drafted.

His assessment of that work is unsentimental. "I learned that a lot of what gets done in Washington is what doesn't get done. A lot of ideas are brought up; many of them are buried in committee and never see the light of day. An important part is to stop bad ideas and shift the thinking in another direction."

How the AfA built its monitoring operation

A late-night discovery forced the association to professionalise its lobbying. A friend at a trucking association called Fried's attention to a newly published highway bill containing a last-minute clause imposing a bond requirement that also covered forwarders. The AfA leadership concluded it needed a lobbyist tracking every piece of logistics legislation in Congress.

Fried compares the task to NASA tracking space debris to prevent collisions with satellites. "You can't do it all yourself. You've got to surround yourself with competent people."

A second lesson from Capitol Hill: numbers carry weight. Coalition approaches to legislators, Fried found, achieve more than solo lobbying. That produced sustained cooperation with the National Retail Federation and other bodies. "We have divergent interests, but there are also things we have in common," he says.

The strategy shows in the AfA's own structure. Its annual AirCargo conference runs in partnership with the Air & Expedited Motor Carriers Association, and the association's membership now includes airlines, airports, trucking providers and handling agents. "We felt we should have them at the table and hear their perspective," Fried says. "This is still a people business. That's one thing that hasn't changed in the past 21 years."

What does Smith inherit?

"The challenges have changed, but they're still numerous," Fried says. He lists global uncertainty overhanging the industry and its customers, the situation in the Middle East and its effect on air cargo flows, fuel and insurance costs, and a sharpened criminal threat.

"Cargo theft has always been an issue; now it's in hyperdrive," he says. "The bad guys got smart. They leverage automation, and they've learned how to circumvent GPS tracking devices."

Airport infrastructure is a further pressure point. "We have bottlenecks at the major airports because of a complete lack of cargo infrastructure investment," he says.

The most direct dispute for Smith may be IATA's white paper on the Direct Air Waybill framework, which Fried rejects outright. "IATA is telling us: 'You're on the air waybill; you've got to take full responsibility.' Freight forwarders should not be expected to assume liability for cargo they neither own, pack, nor control. We're intermediaries," he says. Smith will now carry that argument into a debate with consequences for every forwarder's insurance exposure and contract terms.