Compared with ocean and rail transport, air transport has the advantages of fast transport speed, high cargo quality, and is not restricted by ground conditions. Cross-border e-commerce has broken down the original bulk trade orders of containers shipped by sea into high-frequency, fragmented and small trade orders, and more and more export goods are presented in the form of air parcels. On the one hand, this change has led to the overall downturn in international shipping business, and on the other hand, it has brought major development opportunities to the international air transport industry, especially the logistics of the global postal system and commercial express delivery system, which are currently thriving due to cross-border e-commerce, and most of them are completed by air transport.
International aviation mainly has the following modes of transport.
(I) Flight transport
Flight transport refers to aircraft with fixed departure times, routes and terminals. Since flight transport has fixed routes, ports of call, fixed sailing periods, and relatively fixed charging standards within a certain period of time, importers and exporters can predict the departure and arrival times of goods and calculate freight costs before signing a trade contract, and the performance of the contract is also more guaranteed, so it has become the preferred form of air freight for most traders.
Depending on the object of the business, scheduled air transport can be divided into passenger flights and cargo flights. As the name implies, the latter only undertakes cargo transportation, mostly using full cargo aircraft. Since the amount of cargo carried by air transport in international trade is limited, cargo flights are only opened by some large-scale specialized air cargo companies or some comprehensive airlines with a wide range of business on routes with a relatively concentrated cargo volume. For passenger flights, general airlines usually use passenger-cargo hybrid aircraft, which undertake the transportation of small quantities of cargo while carrying passengers.
(II) Charter transport
Charter transport refers to an airline company renting the entire aircraft to one or several charterers (charterers refer to shippers or air freight forwarding companies) according to agreed conditions and rates, and shipping goods from one or several airports to the designated destination. Charter transport is suitable for bulk cargo transportation, with lower rates than scheduled flights, but the delivery time is longer than scheduled flights. Since cargo space is often limited under scheduled flight transport, charter transport becomes an important method when there is a lot of cargo.
Charter transport can be divided into two forms: full charter and partial charter. The so-called full charter refers to the transportation method in which an airline or charter agency rents the entire aircraft to the lessee according to the conditions and freight rates agreed upon by both parties in the contract, and ships goods from one or several airports to the designated destination. Partial charter refers to the form of cargo transportation in which several air freight agencies or shippers jointly charter an aircraft, or a charter company sells the space of an aircraft to several air freight agencies. Relatively speaking, partial charter is suitable for transporting goods of more than one ton but less than the volume of a full aircraft. In this form, the freight rate is lower than that of regular flight transport, but the transportation time is longer because it is necessary to wait for other cargo owners to prepare the goods.
(III) Concentrated consignment
Concentrated consignment refers to the air freight agency concentrating several batches of separately shipped goods into one batch and consigning them to the airline (can be a regular flight or charter transportation method), filling out a general waybill and sending it to the same destination, and then the local agent entrusted by it distributes it to each actual consignee. The centralized shipping rates of air freight forwarding companies are generally lower than those of airlines, so shippers can get lower rates than airlines, thus saving costs. In addition, air freight forwarding companies can centrally ship goods, allowing the goods to arrive at locations other than the airlines’ destinations, thus extending the airlines’ services and facilitating the shippers.