Air freight parcel delivery is the transfer and shipment of goods via an air carrier, which may be charter or commercial. Such shipments travel out of commercial and passenger aviation gateways to anywhere planes can fly and land. From pickup to delivery, the process is straightforward. Your logistics provider will coordinate with a local carrier to pick up at your warehouse or holding facility. Once the freight is loaded, the carrier will tender the shipment to the airport, where it will be put onto a plane. When the shipment arrives at the destination airport, your carrier will arrange for pickup and delivery.
The benefits of air freight
There are three considerations you should have in mind to determine when you should ship by air:
- Speed
Think five days from a factory in China to a warehouse in the United States. Airplanes are about 30 times faster than ocean liners. Passenger jets cruise at 575 mph, while slow-steaming ocean liners move at 16-18 mph. Use this transit time calculator, based on data from real recent shipments, to get estimates of transit times for air shipping. In general numbers, air freight is usually 5X the price of trucking and 16X the price of ocean freight, according to the World Bank.
- Reliability
People are pickier than packages, which has encouraged the freight market to develop more dependable freight cargo services, and combined with better air freight data movement, shipping by air provides better air freight tracking and the knowledge that your goods will get to the right place at the right time.
- Protection
While ocean piracy is on the decline, goods are more likely to be damaged in ocean freight shipping than air shipping. Agile Shipping has no interest in being a high-volume, one-model-fits-all provider. Our clients are not just numbers, and every shipment is given the individual attention to detail it requires.