5 Module

th

MANAGEMENT OF AIR CARGO

Handling
 The Air Freight

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

 The Air Freight

Handling

 Ramp handling covers services provided to the aircraft between

arrival and departure, including guiding it to its parking bay,
cleaning, refueling, deicing, passenger baggage handling, transfer of
passengers and crew members.
 The Air Freight

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,
 baggage check-in,
 cargo reception,
 transfer from the cargo facility to the aircraft and loading.
 The Air Freight
Handling

 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
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 transportation modes
 The Air Freight &
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
 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) cargo
concept.
 The Air Freight &
Other transport modes

 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 labor

 Generically termed into (20-ft equivalent unit)

 These containers can be lifted automatically from trains, trucks onto ships and vice versa
in so-called multimodal freight movements
 The Air Freight &
Other transport modes

 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 thousands of 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
 The Air Freight &
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 concept of carrying 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 concept can accommodate a mix of shipping containers, wheeled
cargo and truck trailers.