Preighter aircraft

[Ziggurat]

This confuses me.

Passenger airliners have capacious cargo holds underneath the passenger compartment. Some of that space is occupied by passenger luggage, of course. The rest by freight.

And there is absolutely a dedicated system for loading the cargo holds of passenger liners.

So what's the actual claim here? That the demand for vaccine shipments is so large that it has saturated both the dedicated cargo carrier market, and the cargo-carrying capacity of passenger airliners?

The claim is probably about protective equipment, not vaccines, since we needed a lot of that stuff early in the pandemic. Vaccine shipping demand didn’t come until recently, and the volumes are low since vaccines are small.

But it’s wrong. The demand for freight dropped. The reason to put cargo in the passenger area isn’t because the demand was high, but because without passengers, you are wasting cargo potential (and revenue) if you don’t. You want to run your planes as close to full as possible, because each flight has a fixed cost component.