Shipping requirements stricter as airlines, 3PLs work around US airport congestion

Cargo handling and pickup at major destination airports has slowed significantly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and airlines and freight forwarders are applying more rigorous standards in accepting freight at airports to mitigate slowdowns. Airport congestion has been a problem at major U.S. gateways during the pandemic, exacerbated by labor shortages and more severe problems in the ocean freight market . [caption id="attachment_64519" align="alignright" width="450"] Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) Photo credit: Glenn Beltz, flicker[/caption] The congestion is “centering around a lot of our key gateway locations, whether it's New York (JFK) and Chicago (ORD) and LAX … but we're still experiencing challenges in both the Dallas and the Atlanta markets, as well,” said C.H. Robinson Vice President of Air Freight Products and Services Matt Castle. “It’s just been one of those things that has continued to build on itself over the course of the last six or seven months. And I feel like it hit a bit of a tipping point here on the tail of quarter two ending.” The tipping point is at least partially due to new air cargo security screening standards the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) began enforcing at the beginning of the third quarter. With all international cargo now requiring screening, airlines and freight forwarders are taking a stricter approach to cargo tenders to reduce slowdowns ahead of airport-to-airport transport. At Miami International Airport (MIA), a busy hub for logistics company Team Worldwide and a major U.S. perishables, Caribbean and Latin American gateway, “you can wait three to four hours to drop off cargo, not just to pick up, and some facilities will only accept cargo for a very short time before a flight because they’re at capacity,” Bob Imbriani, VP of international services, recently told Air Cargo World. “Almost every major airport” in the U.S. is being impacted by the increased time needed for cargo screening, Imbriani said. C.H. Robinson’s Castle agreed that freight forwarders are seeing smaller windows for cargo drop-off “really across the board, we're seeing it, in most locations where the carriers have really tightened up that process in terms of dropping freight off, or tender times,” including hubs with established congestion problems such as JFK, ORD and LAX. Freight forwarders are responding in kind by expanding services while also changing their own approaches to freight tenders. “In many instances, at select origins and for certain carriers and associated terminals, we've simply moved away from tendering loose freight at origin,” Castle said. “So where all things are equal, we’ve been moving towards built units, just because the recovery process is a little bit more under our control, in how we can navigate and manage that piece of it.” In addition to increasing efficiency for individual shipments, C.H. Robinson is expanding its vendor relationships and utilizing multi-modal solutions to mitigate the impact of congestion, Castle told Air Cargo World . “With the influx of freight that I think the market and the industry is feeling, we've had to expand the number of vendors that we're working with, whether it's the breakdown agent, you know, whether it's a breakdown, warehouses, and even some of it carries over to the transfer agents,” Castle said. Expanding trucking within the U.S. has also been an effective strategy for more efficiently exporting cargo. “We've started a regular cadence with some dedicated line hauls into markets that are a little bit less congested or have access to capacity,” he said. “We’ve got some line hauls moving down to Miami to support [Latin America] and we've got a number of line hauls moving out to [Los Angeles] to support Oceania.”

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