Why now?

Air logistics has grown to a $200 + billion business, of which 80% represents distribution activity. The industry has evolved from belly freight in passenger planes on a space available basis, to dedicated fleets of jumbo jets loaded with high value goods. Although demand growth is large capacity growth is constrained due to several limitations around airport infrastructure such as available slots and groundside flow of goods. Also, while average growth has been around 6% on an annual basis, yields tend to decline.

While integrators are able to move documents and small packages rapidly and efficiently with next day domestic and two day international service, an airfreight shipment typically takes 5-6 days to reach its final destination. More importantly, today's air cargo handling methods leave shipments sitting idle 75% or more of the time.

Sea Freight as Example

Currently, handling of air cargo requires a number of inefficient, labor-intensive steps which begin at the shipper's side and continue all the way until receipt of the shipment by the consignee. Contrary to the world of sea freight, where the ISO container introduction some 50 years ago has caused a tremendous turn in cargo handling, the air cargo industry is still based on the airport-to-airport approach instead of the door-to-door, safe and secure, shipper to consignee way of thinking. The introduction, and subsequent adoption as a world standard of the 40ft ISO sea container resulted in a decrease of port handling costs from $5,60 to $0.16 dollar per Tonne nowadays. We foresee identical success for the Cargobox as the air cargo industry standard.

Nine Years of Development

Today, after more than 9 years of research and development, the Cargobox can be introduced to the market. The Cargobox System combines a re-usable, collapsible light-weight container, and a closing strip, the "Lockbar", comprising a RFID Technology based active tag as communications module, resulting in a "systems approach" to visibility (tracking and tracing) and control management of a shipment. The Cargobox System substantially reduces overall transportation time and costs, and allows for security improvements throughout the entire Logistic Supply Chain. Using the Cargobox, it becomes virtually impossible to bring explosives on board of an aircraft. Cargobox is an "Intelligent Container", providing interconnected electronic documents flow and real time mode A to Z control shipments.

Objective

The objective is to create and implement a safe and secure, efficient, flexible multi-purpose air cargo handling system, which enhances flight safety, is cost effective and sustains today's required security level in the entire supply chain including the airline industry. More particular, to demonstrate that world-wide application of the Cargobox and its CargoSyst Software as the basic packaging unit and logistics handling control method for (air) cargo shipments to the "free from any compromise" level, as announced by US and EU authorities after September 11th, 2001 and March 11th, 2004.

Rather than creating an additional layer in the Logistic Supply Chain, Cargobox will deploy commercial activities based on strategic partnerships with existing major players in the Transportation Industry. We focus on the development of a business model similar to the car rental formula: at each relevant airport a dispatch and recovery center provides actual services such as supply management, dispatch and return pick-up services, pool management and cleaning and repair. Candidates to exploit such a storage/dispatch/recovery center are Integrated Forwarders. It is obvious that it will take some time to bring it to blossom.

History