International Air Freight

What decides the cost

Airlines bill on chargeable weight — the greater of actual weight and volumetric weight, where volume is converted at a standard divisor. Light, bulky cargo therefore pays on its size, not its scales, which is why how a shipment is packed and palletised changes the invoice. We check the chargeable weight before we quote so there are no surprises when the cargo is weighed at the airline’s warehouse.

Beyond the rate itself, an air shipment carries terminal handling, screening, fuel and security surcharges, and — where applicable — dangerous goods or special handling fees. We itemise these at quotation. Where a charge genuinely cannot be fixed in advance, such as storage if clearance is held up at the destination, we say so up front rather than adding it at the end.

Special cargo

Not everything flies on a normal booking. Dangerous goods must be classified, packed, marked and documented to IATA rules, and a single wrong entry on the shipper’s declaration will ground a consignment. Pharmaceuticals and perishables need temperature control and a routing that keeps them inside their window. Lithium batteries, whether loose or in equipment, sit under their own tightening rules. We handle these as a matter of routine — the point of using a forwarder rather than booking direct is that the compliance work is done by someone who does it every week.

Booking around the peaks

Air capacity out of India is not a constant. Belly space rises and falls with the passenger schedule, freighter capacity gets pulled onto whichever lane is paying best that month, and the weeks before a major festival or a Western retail season are tight everywhere. A rate quoted in a quiet week is not a rate you can hold in a busy one.

What this means in practice is that lead time is worth money on air freight in a way it is not on sea. Give us a week and we can plan a routing, hold space and often beat a spot booking; give us a morning and we will still move the cargo, but on whatever is available at whatever it costs. Where you have a shipping calendar — a production run finishing, a launch date, a seasonal window — tell us early and we will book against it rather than reacting to it.

The gateways, and what each is good at

India does not have one air cargo market — it has half a dozen, and they do not behave alike. Mumbai (BOM) offers the deepest carrier choice and the widest onward network, and it is also the most congested: cargo carted in on a Friday evening in a peak week can wait for space that the same booking would have walked onto on a Tuesday. Delhi (DEL) carries the most dedicated freighter capacity and serves the northern manufacturing belt, which makes it the natural exit for engineering goods coming down from Ludhiana, Gurugram and the industrial towns around them.

Bengaluru (BLR) and Hyderabad (HYD) between them move most of the country’s temperature-controlled pharmaceutical and perishable traffic, with airside cold rooms and acceptance procedures built around keeping a consignment inside its window rather than merely inside the building. Chennai (MAA) sits beside the automotive and engineering cluster of the south and handles a great deal of component traffic on tight production clocks. Cochin (COK) is a smaller gateway with a real specialism — marine products and spices — and shorter queues at the terminal, which now and then makes it the quicker option even when it is not the closest.

The practical consequence is that the nearest airport is not automatically the right one. Trucking overnight to a gateway with a direct service can comfortably beat a local uplift that tranships twice, because every transhipment is a place where cargo can be offloaded for weight and roll to the following flight. Where the trade-off is a night on the road against a day in a transit shed, we put both options in front of you with the real numbers attached.

The paperwork behind an air waybill

Every commercial export leaves on a shipping bill filed through ICEGATE, and that filing depends on registrations being in place before the cargo turns up. Your AD code — the authorised-dealer code of the bank that will receive the export proceeds — has to be registered at the specific customs location you are shipping from, so a first consignment out of an unfamiliar gateway needs that done in advance rather than on the morning of the flight. Exports move zero-rated under a letter of undertaking; without a valid LUT, IGST has to be paid on the invoice and claimed back afterwards, which is money sitting still for no good reason.

The air waybill itself is not a document of title. Unlike a bill of lading it cannot be endorsed and traded, and the consignee named on it is the party the carrier will release to — which is why naming a bank or an agent as consignee under a letter of credit needs thinking about before the waybill is issued rather than after. The description on it has to agree with the commercial invoice, the packing list and the shipping bill, because customs reads all four against each other.

The failures we see most are mundane. A gross weight on the invoice that the airline scale disagrees with. A goods description written for the buyer instead of for customs. An HS code copied across from last year’s shipment for a product that has since changed. A dangerous goods declaration missing a UN number or a packing instruction reference. None of these is difficult to get right; each of them stops cargo at the terminal door, and a shipment held at acceptance has already missed its flight.

What the carrier is liable for, and what it is not

International carriage by air out of India is governed by the Montreal Convention, and the Convention caps what an airline owes you. Liability for loss, damage or delay to cargo is limited by weight — currently 22 special drawing rights per kilogramme of the affected package, a figure the treaty machinery revises periodically. Special drawing rights are an IMF unit, so the rupee equivalent moves with the exchange rate. The important word in all of that is kilogramme: the cap is calculated on weight, not on what the goods are worth.

Work that through with a real example. A control module weighing six kilogrammes, worth several lakh rupees, is destroyed in transit. The recovery under the cap is a small fraction of the loss, and no amount of arguing changes it. There is a mechanism to raise the ceiling — a special declaration of interest on the air waybill, against a supplementary charge — but it is rarely economic. All-risks cargo insurance costs a fraction of what the declaration does and covers far more of the journey.

Time limits matter as much as money. The Convention expects a written complaint within fourteen days of receipt where cargo is damaged, and within twenty-one days where it is delayed, calculated from the date the goods were placed at the consignee’s disposal. Miss those windows and the claim is dead regardless of its merits. So: photograph damage before anything is moved, keep the packaging and the pallet as they arrived, note the exception on the delivery receipt, and tell us the day you see it rather than the week after.

A realistic clock on an air shipment

The flight is the shortest part of an air movement. Before it, the cargo has to be collected and trucked to the gateway — the same day within a metro, a day or two from an inland town — then screened and accepted at the terminal against the airline cut-off, which typically falls several hours before departure and earlier still for dangerous goods. In parallel the shipping bill is filed, examined if the risk system selects it, and the let-export order obtained. Only then is the consignment genuinely on the flight.

After it lands there is break-bulk at the destination terminal, the import entry, duty payment and release, and the final delivery. On a straightforward lane with clean documents and a consignee who is ready to clear, door to door is a matter of a few days rather than hours. Where a deadline is genuinely tight, the time is found on the ground and not in the air: pre-filing the export entry, pre-alerting the destination agent with the document set the moment the waybill is issued, and making sure someone at the far end has the authority to pay duty without waiting for a signature.