BY MARK B. SOLOMON, SENIOR EDITOR
AIR FREIGHT
transportationreport
Slow skies
Global commerce is racing
toward full automation. But the
fastest transport mode remains
stuck on a paper route.
IT’S BEEN SAID GLOBALIZATION’S FIRST ERA
was driven by money and its second era will be driv-
en by time. If so, air freight, with its natural speed-to-
market advantages, should be sitting pretty.
Yet that’s far from the case. In fact, if the industry
can’t shake free from a self-imposed technology strait-
jacket, it could find itself a decade from now mourn-
ing the time passed as a gigantic lost opportunity.
The world is becoming rapidly digitized and
increasingly reliant on e-commerce. Airfreight users
and providers work in a mobile world with changing
expectations for service levels and how to manage
them. Yet communications in the air supply chain
remain awash in paper. Each international shipment
requires 30 or more paper documents to process and
transmit, according to the International Air
Transport Association (IATA), the Geneva-based
global airline trade group. Robert Mellin, head of
distribution logistics for Ericsson, the Swedish network and telecom giant and a big airfreight user, told
a conference in April its annual logistics documentation could fill a Boeing 747 aircraft.
A typical international shipment booked by a
freight forwarder and moved in the belly of a passenger aircraft can take up to six days to reach its consignee, even though it takes less than a day to fly it
there. The shipment’s remaining time is spent languishing in customs waiting to be processed and
cleared, or stuck in a labyrinth that also includes the
ground handling agent, the trucker, the importer,
and the customs broker. The six-day window, which
hasn’t changed much over the years, gave rise to the
maxim that 80 percent of an air shipment’s time is
actually spent on the ground.
Some of this might be sloughed off if air freight
were the only global game in town. But it’s not. In the
past decade, less-than-containerload (LCL) ocean
services have improved in speed and dependability,
and have become an attractive alternative to air
because goods can still move reasonably fast yet at a
significant discount to pricey flights. This makes it
easier for shippers to “trade down” in transit times
and still offer a cost-effective service.
Atlanta-based shipping and logistics giant UPS
Inc. is expanding an enhanced version of its LCL
service that, depending on the traffic lanes, can be as
