Logjam at port? Fly right over it.
Assuming you can find a container, that is.
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Pandemic congestion in American intermodal container shipping ports is finally receding and its reverberations throughout the supply chain are echoing quieter. Businesses have no doubt learned some lessons over the past two years regarding supply chain redundancy and resiliency which may get taken to heart or may quickly be forgotten as competitive pressures force a return to our old duct-taped, patchwork “normal”. While people smarter than I am debate the possibilities of port automation and intricacies of network optimization, here are two half-baked but nonetheless entertaining options for bypassing the next seaport mess entirely.
That’s One Way To Do It
Seaboard World Airlines (SWA), a New York-based cargo carrier with a reputation for hauling unusual cargo, was likely the first and only major civil airline to transport standard intermodal shipping containers on a regular basis. SWA came about just before Malcom McLean’s standardized containers started taking hold in the 1950s, and shippers were looking for ways to include air in McLean’s sea-truck-rail system. What better way to facilitate truly intermodal freight transportation than by literally sliding one of his containers onto an airplane?
SWA’s program apparently saw moderate success for a time but the economics of smaller and lighter aircraft-specific containers (which eventually evolved into unit load devices, later) eventually won out. The heavy steel walls that protected containerized cargo while at sea and the sturdy steel corner posts that allowed for stacking up to eight units high made little sense for relatively expensive air shipment where space usage and cargo maximization are key.
Grab ‘n’ Go
More recently, Boeing patented a form of cargo aircraft in 2015 that can quite literally pick up up to 14 standard shipping containers and transport them via air the same way a gantry crane picks up single containers in port. The planes are relatively short and low profile, propeller driven (they can use shorter runways and are more efficient at lower speeds), and somewhat funny looking:
Standardized containers in aircraft are nothing new. Aside from Seaboard World Airlines’ above standard container design which did not, ahem, take off, airlines have for years been using unit load devices (ULDs) that fit comfortably within the fuselage of their planes and maximize the space available for cargo. A major problem for ULDs, however, is that of transloading: it costs time and money to load and unload the curved-sided boxes which themselves rarely ever leave airport grounds (when not being shipped via plane).1 Standard shipping containers, on the other hand, are used intermodally; designed to move from truck to ship to rail cheaply and with ease.
As designed, the plane relies on ISO standard twist lock fasteners to lock the containers into the airframe—locks that do not have a history of never failing, and this design’s 14 container capacity pales in comparison to the 100+ container trains that railroads pull around every day. The longer-distance drayage against which Boeing’s containerplane would compete (think of hauling boxes from near the Ports of LA/Long Beach to Denver for regional distribution) would simply not make economic sense. Boeing’s patent is clearly just staking a claim on some possible future trend, but at least we got a cool YouTube video out of it for now.
Air freight’s value proposition tends toward higher value and more urgent cargo. Sea and rail, on the other hand, are better suited for low value and slow movement, while trucking fills the gaps in between. Despite the attractiveness of true intermodal transportation—the ability to move freight between modes of transport in a single container—air simply does not comport with sea, truck, and rail when it comes to standardization. Transloading, in this case physically moving cargo between shipping containers and aircraft unit load devices, is simply more cost effective and sensible than the dreamers at Seaboard World Airlines might have been willing to admit. Innovation is often rewarded, but other times it only results in lessons learned.
Aircraft unit load devices are only somewhat standardized as well, with specific standard designs (e.g., LD-1, LD-2, etc.) only being compatible with specific aircraft. This incomplete standardization and limited use are also reflected in the fact that only about 900,000 ULDs are in circulation today compared to six million+ standard intermodal containers.