Air freight reinvents
itself once again
BY GARY FRANTZ, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
AIR FREIGHT TRANSPORTATION
Airfreight industry players have spent years—if not decades—adapting to constantly
changing market conditions. Between e-commerce, Amazon, global trade, and the march
of technology, that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.
IT SEEMS LIKE EVERY DECADE SINCE THE AIRLINES
were deregulated in 1978, the airfreight industry, and the
airfreight forwarders that have served as the industry’s
backbone, has reinvented itself.
The latter part of the 1990s and certainly the first two
decades of the 2000s have seen perhaps the most dramatic
evolution. During this time, the industry witnessed UPS
expand from its traditional U.S. ground package service to
launch its own airline and add forwarding, buy a less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier, expand into global operations, and
offer integrated logistics; FedEx branch out from express air
into ground parcel, the LTL business, international service,
and contract logistics; growth in the outsourcing of logistics domestically and worldwide; and forwarders morphing
from middle-players into third-party logistics service providers (3PLs) with a wider portfolio of capabilities.
Then there was the rise of Amazon, the birth and then
explosive growth of online commerce, the emergence of
longer and more complex supply chains as global trade
expanded and interdependence increased, and a techno-
logical revolution in transportation and logistics unlike
anything previously seen in the industry.
“When I came into the business 25 years ago, most of
what we moved went by air—and 60% to 70% of it was
domestic,” recalls John Hill, president and chief commer-
cial officer of Glen Mills, Pennsylvania-based Pilot Freight
Services. That freight moved in the bellies of passenger air-
lines and with the integrated all-cargo carriers, such as the
venerable Emery Air Freight, acquired by UPS in 2004, and
Burlington Air Express, acquired by the logistics division of
Germany’s Deutsche Bahn in 2006.
Today, Hill says, maybe 5% of the shipments Pilot han-
dles domestically move by air, with the rest staying on the
road running in a package, ground forwarding, truckload,
or Pilot’s own ground network. Globally, some 85% of
Pilot’s shipments move via air, with the rest by ocean.
The old airfreight forwarder model where you were the
middleman who arranged a “full mile” transportation
Air freight reinvents
itself once again
