Airports usually do not serve just passenger flights, but also cargo flights. Cargo airliners are handled in other areas than the passenger flights. They don't need jet bridges, but instead the ground crew needs to load and unload a lot of cargo very fast. Special cargo terminals are built for this purpose.
The world's largest cargo airline is FedEx Express with almost 700 airplanes. You can see one of these on the next set of pictures. It's a small ATR turbo-prop aircraft - at least small when compared to other aircraft that FedEx uses.
More and more cargo carriers fly to Prague, because Prague has a strategic location in the very center of Europe, the roads and railways connecting it with neighboring countries are good, and the equipment on Ruzyně is high quality.
To handle the aircraft on the ground, airlines rent services of support groups. The group will then provide pushback, refuelling, and everything else that is needed. Often there is more than one company that provides these services on each airport; usually it's the airport itself, the airline or airlines that use the specific airport as a hub, and maybe some other company. In case of Ruzyně, it's Ruzyně airport, Czech airlines (I will talk about them in more detail later), and a company called Menzies group. You already saw some of the pushback tractors that belong to this company and here you can see the company's headquarters.
But this is not all from the cargo chapter. Read on!
Copyright notice: Text and images copyright by Michal Řeháček.