On 31 January, AmCham EU organised a site visit to the UPS air hub of the Cologne Bonn airport for the Coordinators of the TRAN committee in the European Parliament.
 
Brian Simpson, Chair of the committee, was joined by Said El Khadraoui (S&D coordinator), Dieter-Lebrecht Koch (EPP, Committee Vice Chair), Gesine Meissner (ALDE Coordinator) Roberts Zile (ECR Coordinator) and Michal Wojciechowski (Administrator for the TRAN Committee). The visit was very timely, as it took place right before MEPs start discussing the threefold airport package, which proposes to revise existing regulation on the noise emissions of airports, slot allocations for airlines, as well as the liberalisation of airport groundhandling services.

To get an idea of the scale of the UPS operations on site (the largest in Europe): The UPS air hub employs 2,300 people, and exclusively operates by night between 23.00-2.30 to be able to meet the customer commitment of ‘next day delivery'. The Cologne site has the capacity to sort 110,000 packages per hour, and is currently expanding its operations to reach a capacity of 190,000 packages/hour in 2013.
 
Being on site, seeing the packages get sorted on massive conveyor belts and planes landing, being unloaded, reloaded and taking off again, gave MEPs the occasion to see firsthand the implications and potential of the legislative proposals currently on the table.The visit was the occasion for a very fruitful exchange of views and information between the MEPs, AmCham EU members and UPS staff.