Originally Posted by
scifi
Thanks for all the replies. Does anyone know how this works in practice..? Hypothetically....
If I was a manufacturer of say Cornflakes, and I wished to ship about 10,000 boxes out to Lanzarote each week. Would I need to arrange with each airline to carry a few. Or would that be left to the airport dispatchers, to put as many as they could onto each available plane..?
.
As others have said, most passenger aircraft have at least some 'bellyhold' cargo capacity. And some have more than others, depending on a/c type, the route being flown, how much fuel costs at each end of that route and a whole lot more. But not all airlines offer / sell that capacity. E.g. Ryanair and many other locos do not carry any cargo because they require fast turnarounds and it can take a while to load cargo..
'Capacity' is also affected by the weight vs physical size of the cargo, usually expressed as Actual (weight) vs Dims (dimensions). Your boxes of cornflakes weigh relatively little compared to their volumetric size vs, say, books which are heavy for their size. Thus all your cornflakes would fill out any spare belly capacity without the aircraft reaching max weight. And putting in as many books as the max weight of the aircraft would allow would mean there is still unused ('wasted') space in the holds. So it's a balance / trade-off between the two.
Other factors to consider with airfreight, which costs considerably more than sea, would be the urgency of getting the product to market (e.g. for a new product launch), perishability -. a lot of fruit and veg comes from distant places in the belly of PAX aircraft, and much, much more.
Hope that helps,
CS