Air Freight

With the advent of powerful, wide-bodied jets flying at high altitude, freight can be delivered ever faster to your destination, shortening the length of your supply chain and increasing the reliability of your lines of supply.

The new Boeing 747-8F, when fully laden, takes off at 442 ton of which 140 ton is payload with a range of over 8000 Km. Even a medium range Airbus A320 will carry, besides its 150 passengers, over 16 ton of cargo for over 6000 km.

Air freight has changed the way companies do business. Documents and trading practices established over 3,000 years of commercial shipping were suddenly obsolete as the cargo started arriving before the documents were completed. In most countries the formalities and documentation around air freight is far simpler and cheaper to generate than the paperwork for sea cargo, resulting in smaller consignments of less than 100 Kg and half a cubic meter often being shipped more economically by air than by sea.

Another revolution was the volume to weight ratio allowed by air freight: where in a sea-going vessel you pay “weight / measure” that is, the higher of the weight in metric ton versus the volume in cubic meters; airlines allow 6 volume to each weight. This means that air freight is eminently suitable to light weight, high value cargo.

At Sebenza World we have flown stud bulls and sterile laboratory mice; a 747F filled with designer jeans, human organs for direct transplant, steel pipes for drillrigs, dangerous chemicals for ore processing and anything else you can think of. For smaller parcels we have courier solutions that are more economical than standard air freight. Let our experienced team advise you the most cost effective solution for your particular freighting needs. Please click on the contact page for your nearest Sebenza World team member.