Etihad's Crystal Cargo Hit $220 Million. Its Co-Founder Sees an Industry That Still Hasn't Digitised

Three years after Ingo Roessler helped launch Etihad Airways' Crystal Cargo unit from scratch in 2004, the division recorded US$220 million in cargo revenue and won the 'Cargo Airline of the Year' accolade. That figure anchors a four-decade career that began with a Lufthansa apprenticeship in Cologne in 1984 — described by Roessler as "a much-coveted education in those days" — and now sits at the commercial helm of a software vendor trying to fix what he calls the industry's unfinished digitisation.

Roessler, Chief Commercial Officer and partner at Innovative Software SARL, laid out the arc in a "60 Seconds With" interview with Air Cargo Week. The record is concrete: route manager at German Cargo Services from 1987; headhunted by German Railways in 1992 as executive assistant on the project that rebuilt the rail grid between East and West Germany; lured back to air cargo in 1997 by Russi Batliwala, Chapman Freeborn's chairman, then a partner at Capitol Int'l GSA. Samer Majali, then CEO of Royal Jordanian and later Gulf Air, brought him in to reorganise RJ's cargo division in 2007. He returned to Europe in 2010 and joined Innovative Software, founded by ex-CHAMP executive Anders Dam Jensen and led by CEO Richard Stokes, formerly of SITA, to promote the EDIfly transmission and message-handling technology.

What does he say has actually changed in air cargo?

His answer is blunt: too little. "I have seen too little change, really," Roessler said. "IATA failed to create a successful programme in air cargo like passenger e-ticketing." The caveat he attaches is a generational one — a new cohort of air cargo managers, in his view, finally understands IT-driven processes and collaboration. Whether that cohort converts understanding into shipped software at scale is the question EDIfly's own sales record must answer.

He reserves particular scepticism for one buzzword. "We now do API. Many people use this without the slightest idea what it entails," he said. Coming from a CCO whose product is a messaging platform, the criticism cuts both ways: legacy EDI and modern APIs compete for the same integration budgets, and buyers frequently misjudge the cost of either.

The Screwworm flights

The interview's most unusual cargo claim is verifiable in outline. Roessler's German Cargo Services team, part of the Lufthansa Group, supported an FAO campaign against Cochliomyia hominivorax — the New World Screwworm, a pest lethal to warm-blooded animals. DC8-73F flights carried fully laden loads of sterilised fly larvae from Tuxtla, Mexico, to Tripoli, Libya. The operation ran six months without interruption. Roessler says he first read about the pest's potential to spread across Africa in the German magazine Stern before the team offered its solution.

A proposed rule that would shake pricing

Asked which single regulation he would introduce, Roessler targeted economics rather than safety procedure: "No air cargo should be allowed that costs more to fly it than it pays for, especially dangerous goods, where the rates don't reflect the huge risk by far for all operators." The remark points at a live cost-recovery question. Dangerous-goods handling imposes inspection, documentation and incident exposure on carriers; Roessler asserts the tariff structure still transfers that risk below cost. He offers no figures, and no regulator has tabled such a rule.

Views on hubs, payments and hard-won lessons

His operational benchmarks are specific. Singapore Changi earns his "best airport" citation — "the only place that has continuously improved since I first landed there in 1988" — with on-blocks to downtown hotel lobby, checked bags included, in 45 minutes or less. Leipzig Airport's DHL sorting facility and hangars impressed him most among work visits, before their official opening.

His hardest business lesson reads like a collections policy: "A new project is only won, after you have collected the monies from the last invoice."

A resident of Wiesbaden's neighbour in spirit — he cycles Germany's riverbeds and cites Lang Lang, now living in Wiesbaden, as a preferred dinner guest — Roessler keeps a short-listed professional description: "Promote. Close. Repeat." His favourite quote, misattributed to Mark Twain: "They didn't know it was impossible. So, they did it."

If air cargo had a mascot, he says, it would be a chameleon — "ready to adapt to any situation." The industry's next test of adaptability, on his own account, is whether a generation of managers who finally grasp IT-driven process can deliver what IATA's programmes did not: a digitisation milestone equivalent to the passenger e-ticket.