An air cargo community system is a shared online system through which everyone who handles cargo at an airport exchanges the documents and messages for each shipment. Its users are the airlines, the freight forwarders, the customs department, the cargo terminal and the trucking companies. Without it, each of them would send the same details to the others by email, on paper and by phone.
Air cargo carries a small share of goods by weight, but a large share by value. Medicines, phone parts, gold, fresh flowers and seafood often go by air, because speed matters more than cost.
Every air shipment has an air waybill, the document that an airline issues for a consignment. It is the contract for carrying the goods and the receipt for them. Unlike a sea bill of lading, it does not prove who owns the goods. More and more air waybills are now electronic, and are called e-AWBs.
Consider a drug maker in Hyderabad that sends 600 kilograms of tablets to a distributor in Nairobi, Kenya. The forwarder creates the e-AWB in its freight forwarding software and sends it to the community system. The system passes the details to the airline, which books space on a flight leaving that night. The forwarder's customs broker files the shipping bill, India's export declaration, through its customs clearance software, and the community system shows its progress. The truck driver receives a slot to arrive at the cargo terminal at 2 p.m. At the terminal, the cargo is weighed, screened and stored in a cool room. When customs gives the let export order, the permission for the goods to leave India, the system tells the terminal and the airline. The pallets are loaded, and the airline's departure control system confirms the flight's final load and weight. Every party has followed each step on the same system.
After the flight, the airline's airline revenue accounting system records the freight charge. It bills the forwarder, and settles with any partner airline that carried the cargo on a later flight. Several Indian airports run community systems of this kind, and some of the companies that build them are Indian.
An air cargo community system does for an airport what a port community system does for a seaport. It belongs to the trade software described under ocean freight and customs, and it connects with the airline systems described under airline IT systems.