The Future of Mail by Air

A project to develop a postal air waybill (PAWB) and several related activities could enable airlines to manage mail traffic as part of their general cargo systems very soon, with significant cost and service benefits to their postal service customers. Air cargo and airmail must now travel internationally with different documents: the air waybill and postal delivery bill consignment note. Separate processes are required to track the two traffic categories, a problem compounded by the fact that airlines use air waybills to track whole consignments, whereas postal organisations want to be able to track individual bags or trays.
To bring these systems together, airlines and the postal authorities will have to work together to integrate the functions of their cargo and mail system, explains Jörgen van Mook, manager of Operations Planning for the International Post Corporation. “Then the airlines can manage mail in their cargo systems and, over time, do away with the stand-alone systems they use only for mail.” That objective is a central element in a joint initiative called the Future of Mail by Air established in early 2006 by members of the IPC and a group of mail-carrying airlines, including AF-KL cargo.
The postal authorities want airlines to improve the quality of service they provide, particularly for tracking mail consignments, and at the same time charge them less. However, in aligning the processes and systems required to do this, they want to avoid changing the legal status of mail, says Mr. van Mook. “Mail has to remain mail and not become cargo.” Mail and cargo are ruled by different conventions, Mr. van Mook explains. “Mail is ruled by the Universal Postal Union Convention and carried under postal delivery bills. It also has separate procedures for customs clearance.”
The Patch
Postal authorities and airlines have come up with the clever idea of creating a postal air waybill number, a reference number that enables airline cargo systems to track mail without the legal status it would have travelling with an air waybill. “Manifesting mail in a cargo system under a postal air waybill number does not mean creating an electronic air waybill,” Mr. van Mook says. “Mail would continue to travel with a postal delivery bill. However, it would have a special handling code, MAL, in the airline tracking system. IATA recently approved this designation specifically to enable mail tracking. Using a PAWB number, carriers can identify traffic as mail in their cargo systems and identify it for customs.”
Stéphane Bocquet, AF-KL Cargo’s director of Airmail, says the PAWB development is significant. “We will be able to add more value for our customers in the postal sector by providing enhanced tracking and tracing at a reasonable cost. The mail situation today is similar to the time when carriers and forwarders agreed to develop Cargo 2000 in order to ensure better visibility of their shipments.” Moreover, the continuing development of Cargo 2000 could also play a role in the airmail sector, adds Marloeke Werst, AF-KL Cargo’s sales director of Airmail Services. “Cargo 2000 provides the status messages required for tracking cargo based on the use of air waybill numbers. If we introduce postal air waybill numbers for airmail, then it opens the possibility of using Cargo 2000 to generate the messages for that traffic as well.”
In Practice
“The idea now is to let individual airlines and postal authorities decide how they want to number their mail shipments,” says Christophe Eggers, international networks manager for La Poste. The process starts when the post enters the airline booking system and creates a profile for tracking. Then, either the airline issues a PAWB number or the post provides the airline with a number. In one case, the airline could send an allotment of
PAWB’s to the post, which could allocate them to shipments as it sees fit and inform the carrier accordingly. Alternatively, the post could send the airline an EDI message, a Carrier/Document International Transport message that contains information about a consignment of mail given to a carrier. It is the equivalent of an FWB air waybill data message. The carrier would then respond with another EDI message, the Carrier/Confirmation of Receipt or Current Exception message that contains information about the consignment of mail as it is processed by the carrier, including a PAWB number for use by both parties.

The airline uses the PAWB number to track the mail shipment through its cargo system. Meanwhile, the post attaches information about the individual bags and trays comprising the shipment to the PAWB number and sends it to the carrier. The postal organisation at the destination scans the items from each shipment and matches the details to the PAWB tracking information. “The airline tracks the PAWB and the post tracks the individual items,” Mr. Eggers says. “The trick is not to add to the airline’s workload and costs.”
The Pilot
For a recent pilot test, the French postal organisation La Poste and AF-KL Cargo moved daily mail between Paris and Montreal using PAWB’s linked to postal consignment numbers. The project went very well, Mr. Eggers says, with La Poste being able to access AF-KL Cargo’s tracking system manually via the Internet and find delivery information for each shipment. However, before they expand to other routes, the parties involved want to automate these exchanges in their respective tracking systems.
The airline and postal people close to this project believe that the PAWB will become an everyday reality in the international airmail business fairly soon. “It appears we are not far away now,” says Wijnand Aalberts, manager of Operations Support for TNT Post’s international mail unit. “If the posts and the airlines are able to add the use of PAWB’s to their systems fairly quickly and both industries put effort into achieving this, then we could see the start of implementation in the first half of 2008.”