Air freight
Air freight is cargo transportation by aircraft, either in the belly holds of passenger planes or on dedicated freighters. It is the fastest long-distance shipping mode, typically moving goods between continents in one to five days versus four to eight weeks by sea, and it is priced accordingly: rates often run several times the ocean equivalent. Shippers reserve it for urgent, high-value, or short-lifecycle goods.
Examples
Line-down expedite: A connector shortage threatens an assembly line that produces $80,000 of finished goods per day. Flying 40,000 connectors from Shenzhen costs $8,800 versus $1,100 by sea, but they arrive in 3 days instead of 32. The premium is recovered in the first few hours of avoided downtime.
Chargeable weight surprise: A shipment of foam gaskets weighs 180 kg but occupies 2.4 cubic meters. Volumetric weight comes to about 400 kg, so the carrier bills 400 kg at $4.60 per kg: $1,840, more than double what the scale weight implies.
Launch split: A hardware company flies the first 5,000 units of a new device at $1.40 each ($7,000) to hit a retail date, then moves the remaining 45,000 units by ocean at roughly $0.20 a unit.
Definition
Air freight is the premium option in a routing decision, not the default. A working rule of thumb puts it at four to eight times the cost of equivalent ocean freight, so it pays off in three situations: the product is value-dense and freight is a small fraction of unit value, the product life is short and weeks at sea consume the selling window, or the cost of waiting (a stopped assembly line, a missed launch) dwarfs the premium.
Pricing runs on chargeable weight: the greater of actual weight and volumetric weight, which most carriers calculate at 6,000 cubic centimeters per kilogram, about 167 kg per cubic meter. Light, bulky cargo pays for the space it fills, not what the scale says. The rate itself moves with capacity, and because most air cargo rides in the belly holds of passenger aircraft, available space follows passenger schedules, with dedicated freighters concentrated on the main trade lanes.
In direct materials, air is mostly an expediting tool: a supplier slips, the buffer is gone, and flying a partial shipment protects the build while the balance moves by sea. Teams that plan a small air budget against quoted lead times make calmer decisions than teams that treat every air shipment as a five-alarm failure.
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