5 Lecture

th
AIR CARGO MANAGEMENT
16 FEB 2020
Handling
 The Air Freight Supply Chain
Handling

 State-owned airports may carry out their own ground handling,

normally understood to include ramp handling and cargo handling,
although some have opened up these services to commercial
operators
 Ramp handling covers services provided to the aircraft between arrival
and departure, including guiding it to its parking bay, cleaning,
refuelling, deicing, passenger baggage handling and transfer of
passengers and crew
 The Air Freight Supply Chain
Handling

 A single ground handling company or agent (GHA) may provide an

airline with all its handling at a given airport, or this work can be
divided between up to four subcontractors handling passenger and
baggage check-in, cargo reception, transfer from the cargo facility to
the aircraft and loading
 When the forwarder has delivered cargo to the cargo terminal at the
airport of departure, or to the airline’s own dedicated depot, the
handler will inspect it, check whether anything is damaged or missing
against the accompanying documents, prepare the documentation for
exit customs procedures and carry out any required security
procedures
 The Air Freight Supply Chain
Handling

 Cargo that may have been in short-term storage in the air freight
handling facility is transferred from wooden storage pallets or skids
onto metal aircraft pallets or into ULDs
 Newly delivered cargo is combined with transit cargo (arriving from
another airport and now switching flights) and taken to the aircraft for
loading
Other transport modes
 The Air Freight Supply Chain
Other transport modes
 While air transport offers speed and reliability, most intercontinental freight
goes by sea, which is considerably cheaper
 Dry cargo movements by ship, excluding bulk commodities such as oil,
metal ore and grain, totalled approximately 16.9 trillion RTKs in 2009.
These movements include project and heavy lift cargo such as industrial
plant generators, wind turbines, military equipment – anything too big or
too heavy to fit into a container
 Also included here is the ‘wheeled cargo’ category of new cars, buses,
trucks and construction equipment, usually carried on specialized roll-on,
roll-off (ro-ro) vessels
 Break-bulk cargo, typically material stacked on pallets and lifted into and
out of the hold of a vessel by cranes on the dock or aboard the ship itself,
has declined dramatically worldwide as containerization has grown
 The Air Freight Supply Chain
Other transport modes
 Container ships, giving a better like-for-like comparison with the type
of goods that are air freighted, were responsible for about 6.2 trillion
RTKs in 2009 against 166.8 billion RTKs of air freight, so accounted for
more than 97 per cent of international trade movements when
measured this way.
 The adoption of standardized 20-feet and 40-feet sea containers from
the late 1960s onwards allowed handling to become more efficient,
replacing a large element of traditional manual dock labour
 Generically termed as a TEU (20-ft equivalent unit), these containers
can be lifted automatically from trains, trucks and barges onto ships
and vice versa in so-called multimodal freight movements
 The Air Freight Supply Chain
Other transport modes
 The advent of containerization gave forwarders the opportunity to develop
warehouse-to-warehouse and door-to-door services. These are usually
categorized as full container load (FCL) cargo and less than container load
(LCL) or groupage. The same designations are also used by road
transportation companies.
 Containerized cargo includes everything from car parts, machinery and
manufacturing components to frozen meat, seafood, fruit, vegetables and the
full range of consumer goods
 The next generation of container ships will be able to carry up to 9,000
standard 40-ft containers at a time, but they can call at only a limited number
of deep-water ports with the very largest cranes and handling facilities
LCL, or Less Container Load, is where a shipper does not have enough product for a full container;
so he will book a cargo that allows him to load his goods alongside product from other shippers. In this
case, each shipment is separated upon final shipment when delivered to their final destination.
 The Air Freight Supply Chain
Other transport modes
 Shorter intra-regional journeys are made by much smaller container
vessels, typically carrying 200 to 1,000 containers and capable of
calling at many more ports
 Ro-ro vessels carry either complete trucks, with a driver also making
the journey, or unaccompanied trailers that are dropped off by the
driver at the port of embarkation and picked up by another at the
destination port
 Combination con-ro vessels can accommodate a mix of shipping
containers, wheeled cargo and truck trailers.
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