air freight

How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything
by Mike Berners-Lee
Published 12 May 2010

What is worth more, one face-to-face visit or ten video link-ups? It is difficult to see a place in the low-carbon world for much air-freighted food (see Asparagus), let alone durable goods such as clothing. Some garments are air-freighted simply to reduce lead times and cut the cost of stock that is tied up in transit at sea. Air-freight labels are one piece of consumer information that would surely be simple and helpful. Currently these are found on some supermarket fresh produce but nowhere else. I’m sometimes asked about air freight from developing countries: “Surely it’s good to keep supporting that country by carrying on the trade!”

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Overall, baths do serve a purpose, and even the most luxurious needn’t be too bad as long as they are not electrically heated. Then again, if everyone in your household has extravagant bathing habits, they could easily come to over 1 ton per year. A bunch of asparagus 125 g CO2e a 250 g pack, local and seasonal 1.9 kg (4.2 lbs.) CO2e the same pack, air-freighted from Peru to the New York in January 3.5 kg (7.7 lbs.) CO2e the same pack, air-freighted from Peru to the U.K. in January > If you live in New York and your entire diet were as carbon intensive as long-haul asparagus, your food footprint alone would be more than the entire footprint of the average North American. If a Londoner did the same, the footprint of his or her food alone would be more than three times the average U.K. citizen’s total footprint.

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This is because it takes a lot of energy to keep a plane in the air—and also because engine emissions tend to do more damage at high altitude than they do at ground level (see Flying from Los Angeles to Barcelona). For this reason it is difficult to see how there can be any place at all for air-freighted food in a sustainable world. Examples of other foods that are very likely, when out of season, to have been air-freighted or (just as bad) grown in an artificially heated greenhouse include baby corn, baby carrots, snap peas, small green beans,7 fine beans, okra, shelled peas, lettuces, blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries. At the other end of the scale is asparagus grown in season in your own country.

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff
by Fred Pearce
Published 30 Sep 2009

It is perhaps not surprising that, at the time of writing, the Soil Association is considering stripping its prized organic label from air-freighted food. But before we ban foreign food, consider this. Many of the biggest energy inputs come not from transport, but from growing and processing crops. And often British production methods are more energy-intensive. We import three-quarters of our tomatoes, mostly from Spain. In season, buying British is clearly the low-energy option. But for the rest of the year, even air-freighting tomatoes from the polytunnels of southern Spain uses less energy than heating a British greenhouse to grow those tomatoes.

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Should such calculations, include the electricity used to heat or air-condition the restaurant, or even the petrol to drive the farm labourers to work? And does it matter how the energy is produced? If a wind farm is generating the power to grow tomatoes in a greenhouse, does that make it OK? Many people instinctively feel that air-freighting of food to Britain should be shut down. Buy local, they say. We need ‘food patriotism’ says Conservative leader David Cameron. And several UK supermarkets are sticking labels on air-freighted produce, so that customers can choose whether to buy or not. Fair enough. I am all in favour of informed choice. But my own view is that all this maths raises as many questions as it answers. And for me, just as important as any precise measure of carbon dioxide emissions is the human question.

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If British customers decide they don’t want to buy the green beans with the label saying they flew to the supermarket, then Homegrown’s business is doomed. On the face of it, the statistics don’t look good. Emissions from air-freighting beans are 200 times greater than if they had come by ship. But the food-miles issue isn’t that straightforward. In summer there are green beans available grown outdoors in Britain, and eating them is the low-energy option. But the energy needed to air-freight vegetables from Kenya to Britain in winter, when British demand is highest, is actually only about 15 per cent more than the energy needed to heat a greenhouse to grow those vegetables here.

The Locavore's Dilemma
by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu
Published 29 May 2012

Because of their light weight, high value, and perishable nature, 91% of the fresh fruits and vegetables exported from Kenya to the U.K. were air freighted,44 adding, for example, an additional 2–18 pence to the cost of each pack of organic Kenyan green beans.45 Intercontinental air freight adds to the atmosphere 8 kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram transported—about 200 times more emissions and 12 times more energy than sea transport.46 However, a much larger volume of carbon dioxide emissions is released by U.K. passenger flights each year. In fact, passenger flights amount to 90% of all emissions from airlines, with cargo amounting to about 5%. Furthermore, air freighted imports of fresh fruits and vegetables account for less than 0.1% of the total U.K. emissions of carbon dioxide.

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Overall, Kenyan rose production is said to be much more efficient and environmentally friendly compared to Dutch production, reflecting, among other things, the fact that 99% of Dutch emissions were caused by heating and lighting intensive production systems, whereas Kenyan flower production relies mostly on sunshine. In contrast, 91% of Kenyan emissions were attributed to the 4,000-mile air-freight transport from Kenya to the U.K. When the food miles controversy over African perishable products reached its peak in early 2007, supporters of Kenyan exporters were quick to point out that greenhouse gas emissions associated with air-freighted produce were miniscule in comparison with the impact of tourist air travel by citizens of importing nations. They further argued that Kenyan agriculture typically relied on manual labor and organic fertilizers because they couldn’t afford sophisticated farm machines and chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

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It doesn’t inform about anything except the distance travelled.”39 A much more constructive approach to further minimize the environmental impact of agriculture would instead focus on further reducing production and postharvest losses as well as educating consumers on their food handling behaviors. Blame It on the Poor People40 In recent years, about 40% of the U.K.’s air-freighted fresh fruit and vegetable imports have originated in sub-Saharan countries such as South Africa, Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Kenya. These goods drew the ire of uncompetitive European producers and activists who claimed that they were the epitome of unsustainable consumption and therefore deserving of retaliatory measures.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years
by Mike Berners-Lee
Published 27 Feb 2019

Doubling the speed to 30 knots would cut the journey time from two weeks to one but since water resistance goes with the square of the speed, the energy use would go up four-fold. So, patience is good. By contrast, the air freight alternative requires about 2 kWh per tonne per mile18, but can get there the same day. The tiny portion of goods that travel by air are mainly luxuries (such as asparagus in winter and fast-fashion clothing). Crisis management How bad are boats? And can they be electrified? 115 in poorly-managed supply chain logistics also resorts to air freight. (In a former life, working for a boot company, air freight was the very expensive emergency option when stock management had gone astray.) However, whilst the energy and carbon footprints of shipping are good ‘bang for buck’, we’ve already seen that we need to cut out the fossil fuel altogether before long.

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Local tomatoes grown in an energy-intensive hot house in winter could be many times less sustainable than the shipped alternative from a sunnier part of the world. (And in the case of flowers, hot housing them out of season is no better than putting them on a plane.) There is no place for air freighted food in the twenty-first century. To summarise, come the sustainable world, there simply won’t be any air freighted food. In the meantime, you can help by avoiding it where you can and having done that, you can largely relax about food miles and perhaps just use that argument as one more reason to enjoy a local pint in preference to one from thousands of miles away.

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Avoid the naughtier brands, and don’t be scared to boycott in the light of new findings, even if they are household names. • Vary your fish stock in line with sustainable availability, and educate your customers towards a more interesting and wideranging fish taste. Let them know why you are doing this. 36 • • 1 FOOD Avoid air freight. If you do need fish from the other side of the world, properly frozen and put on a boat is the better option by far. Finally, help your customers to understand that fish is a valuable and limited resource. Make sure your sales people can give good answers to the customer questions listed above. What can governments do?

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It
by Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan
Published 15 Mar 2014

Over the same period, the real value of world trade has more than quadrupled as the demand for high-value traded goods has risen more rapidly than incomes, and production processes have fragmented geographically with the rise in global value chains, facilitated by more efficient logistics.16 What most distinctively separated recent decades from previous ones was the coincidence of dramatic political, economic, and technological change.17 The end of the Soviet Union and the integration of China and many former autarkic regimes into the world community coincided with the technological revolution that brought us Amazon (in 1994), eBay (in 1995), Google (in 1998), and Facebook (in 2004). These political and communication upheavals significantly increased the tempo of globalization. Figure 1.1. World air travel and world air freight carried, 1950–2011. Air Transport Association as reported in Jean-Paul Rodrigue, Claude Comtois, and Brian Slack, 2012, “World Air Travel and World Air Freight Carried, 1950–2011,” in The Geography of Transport Systems (New York: Routledge), chap. 3, accessed 19 October 2012, http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch3en/conc3en/evolairtransport.html. Figure by Jean-Paul Rodrigue.

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Genesis Forwarding News, 2010, “Guarulhos Airport Congestion Chaos,” accessed circa 2010 (article no longer available on website), http://www.genesis-forwarding.com/News/Guarulhos-Airport-Congestion-Chaos.aspx. 10. Ruaidhri Horan, 2012, “Frankfurt Airport Strike Causes Air Freight Chaos,” Emerald Freight Express, 17 February, http://www.emeraldfreight.com/news/frankfurt-airport-strike-causes-air-freight-chaos. 11. See, for example, Laura Donnelly, 2013, “British Airways and Heathrow in Blame Game over Snow Chaos,” Telegraph, 19 January, accessed 6 February, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/9813427/British-Airways-and-Heathrow-in-blame-game-over-snow-chaos.html. 12.

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Accessed 23 January 2013. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b3332e0a-348c-11e2-8986-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DVY78Spi. Hopkins, Donald R. Smallpox: The Greatest Killer in History. London: University of Chicago Press, esp. 313 ff. Horan, Ruaidhri. 2012. “Frankfurt Airport Strike Causes Air Freight Chaos.” Emerald Freight Express, 17 February. http://www.emeraldfreight.com/news/frankfurt-airport-strike-causes-air-freight-chaos. Horgan, John. 1997. The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. New York: Broadway Books. Hufnagel, Lars, Dirk Brockmann, and Theo Geisel. 2004. “Forecast and Control of Epidemics in a Globalized World.”

The Ten Million Dollar Getaway: The Inside Story of the Lufthansa Heist
by Doug Feiden
Published 1 Sep 2014

It contains scores of passenger terminals, tens of thousands of parking places, a control tower, three chapels, a central heating and cooling plant, the largest cargo complex in the world, service and storage hangars, a branch office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a hotel, a bank, a garage packed with emergency equipment in case of plane crashes, a guarded quarantine area where a highly lethal botulism antitoxin is stored, a medical building, a federal office building, a police operations building, a boat-launching ramp, two canals for fuel barges, an aviation-fuel storage area, a post office, a remote runway that is only used for assassination-target dignitaries like Pope John Paul II, Fidel Castro, or the Shah of Iran, a Gulf station designed as a strange joke by Edward Durell Stone as a miniature of his American Embassy in New Delhi, India, and a scientific laboratory where hamsters are being trained to sniff out bombs left by would-be terrorists. Not to mention an average of 3,682 aircraft, according to Federal Aviation Administration figures, at any given time. Kennedy is the largest air-freight center in the United States. It is also the largest air-freight center in the world, with Heathrow a distant second. It has more takeoffs and landings solely for the purpose of dropping off or taking on freight in ten months than any other airport on the globe has in the course of a year. It deals in such volume that even the best estimates cite a “probable error of twenty-five percent, plus or minus,” when it comes to computing the amount of cargo the facility handles.

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By a quirk of federal law, airlines are allowed to send by truck the cargo that is supposedly “air freight.” The major carriers routinely take advantage of this little-known fact, a practice that is euphemistically dubbed “substitute air service.” Once the mob came to understand this, trucking skyrocketed in importance. (Gangsters had already made deep inroads in the trucking business dating back to Prohibition days.) Now, it is feared, gangsters on both coasts are moving to monopolize the trucking business and hence to control air freight around the country, force up the rates, and then pass on the extra costs to the legitimate businesses they deal with, who, in turn, can be expected to pass them on to the consumer.

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Authorities suspect that Tony Ducks and his ilk have begun to build a nationwide network to distribute contraband stolen either from the airport’s loading bays or from the trucks themselves, through the accumulation of scores of air-freight trucking concerns. If this takeover pattern is left unchecked, the airlines themselves, wholly dependent as they are on the truckers for their air-freight business, may become its victims. In that case, crime bigwigs might actually come to dictate what subcontractors are employed by the airlines throughout the system. A phone call from a Paul Vario in Florida; an emissary sent by a Tony Ducks in New York; a message relayed from a Jimmy the Gent in Robert’s Lounge—that may be all it takes in the future for a Pan Am to award a lucrative maintenance or restaurant contract to a firm already overrun with mob equity, a firm, no doubt, that would have little or nothing to do with the competitive bidding process.

Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible
by Stephen Braun and Douglas Farah
Published 1 Apr 2008

But by the 1990s, impatient Sharjah officials turned to their sleepy airport as an economic engine. A one-runway field that opened in 1977, Sharjah International Airport could not hope to catch up to rival Dubai as a hub for passenger airlines. But officials began wangling financial incentives to lure foreign-owned air freight firms in the hope of turning the airport into a major cargo center. By the time Bout arrived in Sharjah in 1993, airport officials were touting plans to open a major free-trade zone similar to Dubai’s seaport, eliminating taxes and import and export duties for companies that relocated there. As work crews broke ground in 1995 at an abandoned military base near the airfield, Sharjah officials hired a Syrian-born former U.S.

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Although many of his aircraft were already operating out of Sharjah in the UAE, Bout began using Pietersburg Airport, 180 miles northeast of Johannesburg, as a hub from which he could ply his assorted trades. Bout was already flying gladiolas and other flower species out of Africa to the UAE, at a considerable profit. He began flying beef and poultry from South Africa to other African nations. On a continent with little transportation infrastructure, air freight was the only way to move perishable goods any distance, and Bout’s companies soon grew from the original three to several dozen. Aircraft that Bout could acquire for $30,000 would pay for themselves after just two or three flights. If they fell from the sky, cheap replacements were easy to find.

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Within six months, Air Pass flight operations extended to Angola, the DRC, Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Kenya, Somalia, and Liberia.6 Bout also imported millions of dollars’ worth of spare parts for a maintenance facility for Russian aircraft that he planned to open in Pietersburg.7 In addition to the air freight business, Bout invested in a cold storage unit, at one point carrying $4 million of stock in a hangar at the airport. Bout mulled bigger plans. One was to open a South African version of Sharjah’s free-trade zone with the help of Chichakli. Bout also wanted to start a garment business and a clothing factory.

The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy
by Sasha Issenberg
Published 1 Jan 2007

Most did not lend themselves as readily to transport by air: Fruits and vegetables are typically a low-margin product with enough shelf life to survive an ocean voyage in a reefer boat. Many countries have restrictive laws about the importation of meat—for both health reasons and the desire to protect domestic agriculture—that do not make it always a good candidate for air freight, either. But when it came to seafood, Okazaki determined, the value and sensitivity to decay perfectly matched the economics of air freight. Okazaki and his colleagues knew nothing about fish. “We did not know why canned tuna was white, and raw tuna meat was red,” he recalled. But there was one place every Tokyoite would instinctively go to learn more. So one morning at 5:00, Okazaki headed to the Tsukiji Market in downtown Tokyo for an education.

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It was written by Akira Okazaki, whom MacAlpine had never met but knew was the man responsible for uncovering new markets for cargo worldwide. The message had a simple request: What could MacAlpine find out about tunafishing along Canada’s eastern coast? The inquiry confused MacAlpine, who had entered the air-freight business thinking that the one-way problem would be sorted out in a factory, not on a pier. MacAlpine put his other work aside and began making phone calls to local governments in the maritime province. “I was a young guy and here was a request from head office to get information on something going on in my region,” he recalled.

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They prep most things halfway—like cutting tuna down to fillets but not to actual sashimi-size slices, leaving skin on the sea bass—to save time during busy dinner ser vice. They don’t cut things down all the way because flesh that is exposed to air oxidizes, and that is the greatest threat to freshness. Leaving a fully cut serving of tuna or red snapper out to breathe all afternoon would moot much of the point of rushing it from Tokyo or Cape Cod by air-freight. But once a fish has been cut down to be used for dinner, it is committed; if unused, it will not be able to endure another twenty-four hours idling in a glass display case. And if the restaurant sells out of a certain fish during dinner, there will not be time to claim an untreated piece from the walk-in freezer and prepare it to be served.

The Intelligent Investor (Collins Business Essentials)
by Benjamin Graham and Jason Zweig
Published 1 Jan 1949

We have selected, more or less at random, four companies which are found successively on the New York Stock Exchange list. These are ELTRA Corp. (a merger of Electric Autolite and Mergenthaler Linotype enterprises), Emerson Electric Co. (a manufacturer of electric and electronic products), Emery Air Freight (a domestic forwarder of air freight), and Emhart Corp. (originally a maker of bottling machinery only, but now also in builders’ hardware).* There are some broad resemblances between the three manufacturing firms, but the differences will seem more significant. There should be sufficient variety in the financial and operating data to make the examination of interest.

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The ELTRA figures are especially impressive when set against its low price/earnings ratio. The growth is of course more impressive for the high-multiplier pair. 4. Financial Position. The three manufacturing companies are in sound financial condition, having better than the standard ratio of $2 of current assets for $1 of current liabilities. Emery Air Freight has a lower ratio; but it falls in a different category, and with its fine record it would have no problem raising needed cash. All the companies have relatively low long-term debt. “Dilution” note: Emerson Electric had $163 million of market value of low-dividend convertible preferred shares outstanding at the end of 1970.

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The reader should be impressed by the percentage advance shown in the price of all four of these issues, as measured from the lowest to the highest points during the past 34 years. (In all cases the low price has been adjusted for subsequent stock splits.) Note that for the DJIA the range from low to high was on the order of 11 to 1; for our companies the spread has varied from “only” 17 to 1 for Emhart to no less than 528 to 1 for Emery Air Freight.* These manifold price advances are characteristic of most of our older common-stock issues, and they proclaim the great opportunities of profit that have existed in the stock markets of the past. (But they may indicate also how overdone were the declines in the bear markets before 1950 when the low prices were registered.)

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

In the thirty years between 1975 and 2005, global GDP rose 154 percent, while world trade grew 355 percent. Meanwhile, the value of air cargo climbed an astonishing 1,395 percent. More than a third of all the goods traded in the world, some $3 trillion worth—but barely 1 percent of its weight!—travels via air freight. Air passengers and cargo had recovered their recessionary losses by the summer of 2010 and were accelerating ahead of the global economy. More and more pieces of the latter are living aloft and landing in some pretty strange places. Planes carry the products of the Instant Age—what we want, right now, and typically our most ingenious creations.

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Okazaki hit upon the idea of adapting the cool chain to tuna, converting a nuisance in Nova Scotia into a delicacy in Osaka. On the morning of August 14, 1972—commemorated as “the day of the flying fish”—Okazaki brought five Canadian bluefin to Tsukiji, the fish market in the center of Tokyo. The air-freighted fish were four days old, commanding a respectable (and profitable) $4 per pound at auction. The price would rise 10,000 percent over the next twenty years, as the promise of a worldwide supply raised sushi from street food to a national craze. In a 1980s reprise of tulipomania, tuna prices soared in tandem with Japan’s real estate bubble, and it’s still not uncommon for a four-hundred-pound fish to fetch $175,000 at Tsukiji.

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“This announcement from Tesco is devastating,” said the head of Kenya’s Fresh Produce Exporters Association. Flowers, fruits, and vegetables bound for the U.K. make up a third of the nation’s exports, and as much as a fifth of its economy. “I think if things continue in this one-sided sensationalist way, purely targeting air freight, labeling our produce with aeroplanes and not looking at other aspects of production, it will cripple Kenya. It will cripple the economy.” Tesco was torn between their fears and ours. Greenhouse-gas emissions are higher than at any point in human history, and rising faster than even the worst-case scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
by Peter Singer and Jim Mason
Published 1 May 2006

FLYING HIGH, SHIPPING LOW The increasing amount of food being sent by air is a major problem, because air freight uses almost twice as much energy per ton/mile as road freight. Currently, about half of the freight sent by air travels in the hold of passenger flights when they have spare capacity, which is more efficient than sending it on freight-only aircraft, but the use of air freight is growing more rapidly than passenger travel, and so more freight-only aircraft are flying. It has been predicted that aviation will account for 15 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Although most of that will still be from personal travel, air freight will account for an increasing proportion of that very significant total, and by 2050 could make up nearly a third of the total commercial aviation fleet.

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Eggs are much lighter, on a calorie-to-weight basis, than tomatoes, but even so, it takes the energy equivalent of almost a gallon of diesel fuel to fly three dozen large eggs (weighing about 4 pounds, including the cartons), from Auckland to Los Angeles. Is it justifiable to use that amount of energy to give hens a better life? If no other humanely produced eggs are available, maybe we shouldn't be eating eggs at all. If air freight is the most energy-extravagant way of moving food, sending it by sea or rail are the most economical ways. Rice is grown in California, under irrigation, but it takes a lot of energy to grow it thereabout 15 to 25 times as much energy as it takes to grow rice by lowenergy input methods in Bangladesh.32 The energy used in shipping a ton of rice from Bangladesh to San Francisco is less than the difference between the amount of energy it takes to grow it in California and in Bangladesh, so if you live in San Francisco, you would save energy by buying rice that has traveled thousands of miles by sea, rather than locally-grown rice.

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better
by Annie Leonard
Published 22 Feb 2011

The Air Resources Board in California estimated the costs to public health (including treatment of asthma and lung diseases) from freight trucks at $20 billion annually36; in New Jersey, environmental groups say it’s $5 billion per year.37 Old brakes and tires and frequent overloading increase the likelihood that these vehicles will have accidents, creating further costs in highway patrol and emergency services, traffic delays, etc. Finally, there’s air freight: this is the royal treatment in terms of consumer goods and is reserved for high-value and/or time-sensitive cargo, like designer clothes and some electronics. Although it doesn’t carry much of the total weight, 35 percent of the value of goods traded internationally travels by air, according to Giovanni Bisignani, the CEO of the International Air Transport Association.38 And that’s not all that’s disproportionate about air freight. A study in Europe showed that while planes carried just 3 percent of all European cargo’s weight, they contributed a whopping 80 percent of the total CO2 emissions from freight.39 With the recent spikes in oil prices and looming regulations and/or taxes on CO2, some businesses and governments have already begun to address the energy use and greenhouse gas production from shipping.

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However, there’s still lively, ongoing debate among environmentalists about whether online shopping has a lighter footprint than traditional retail. Retail stores consume resources in their building, lighting, cooling, heating, etc., and consumers usually have to climb into their cars to reach them. However, e-commerce uses more packaging and is more likely to rely on air freight for at least part of the product’s journey. An in-depth study done specifically on book sales compared the two forms of distribution. In the traditional model, books are trucked from the printer to a national warehouse, then to a regional warehouse, and from there to the retail outlets. The customer travels to the store to buy the book and brings it home.

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Of the materials used in the creation of this book, including the printing plates and paper waste, 90 percent were recycled. Any unused inventory or returned books will be recycled. INDEX Abacha, Sani, 31 Abu Dhabi, 66 Acetone, 60 Advertising, 160, 163–168, 251, 256 Advisory committees, 99–100 Afghanistan, 243, 244 Agent Orange, 54, 213 Air freight, 115, 119 al-Qaeda, 26 Alameda County Waste Management Authority, 211 Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), 258 Allan, John, 17 Alloys, 44 Aluminum, 21, 59 Aluminum cans, 64–68, 196 Amazon, 116, 118–121 Amazon River, 66 American Chemistry Council, 93, 99 American Cyanamid, 222 Ammonia, 60, 61 Amnesty International, 28, 32 Anderson, Ray, 19, 185, 187–189 Anderson, Warren, 92 Anheuser-Busch, 196 Antibacterial products, 79 Antimony, 59 Appalachia, 35, 36 Apple Computer, 57, 59, 108, 109, 203, 206 Aral Sea, 46 Arsenic, 13, 15, 35, 59, 73, 203 Autoclaving, 201 Automobile industry, 159–160, 164 Bangladesh, 12–14, 49, 184, 193, 219–221 Barber, Benjamin, 169, 172 Basel Action Network (BAN), 205, 227, 228 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, 227, 258 Batker, Dave, 246 Batteries, 203, 204 Bauxite, 21, 64–65 Beavan, Colin, 147, 239, 245 Bechtel, 140 Bee, Rashida, 91 Benin, 45 Benyus, Janine, 105 Benzene, 30, 48 Beryllium, 203 Beta-hexachlorocyclohexane, 79 Beverage containers, 64–68, 194–195 Bezos, Jeff, 118 Bhopal disaster, India, 90–93, 98 Big-Box Swindle (Mitchell), 121, 125 Big Coal (Goodell), 36 Bingham Canyon copper mine, Utah, 21 Biological oxygen demand (BOD), 10–11 Biomimicry, 104–105 Bioplastics, 230–231 BioRegional, 40 Birol, Fatih, 29–30 Birth defects, 60, 74, 76, 91 Bisignani, Giovanni, 115 Bisimwa, Bertrand, 28 Bisphenol A (BPA), 78, 99–100 Bleach, 15, 48, 56 Blood Diamond (movie), 26, 28 Body burden testing, 78–80 Bolivia, 140 Books, 51–56, 118–120 Borden Chemical, 222 Borneo, 3 Boron, 59 Boston Tea Party, 127 Bottle Recycling Climate Protection Act of 2, 195 Bottled water, 16 Bowling Alone (Putnam), 149, 238–239 Bräutigam, Deborah, 37 Brazil, 8, 66, 67 Breast milk, 81, 82–83, 91, 171 Bridge at the End of the World, The (Speth), 167 Brockovich, Erin, 30 Bromines, 48 Bruno, Kenny, 225 Burkina Faso, 45 Burundi, 27 Bush, George H.

Not the End of the World
by Hannah Ritchie
Published 9 Jan 2024

Many argue that these products are much worse for the environment than meat produced ‘at home’. This is not true because these products are nearly always shipped. But this doesn’t apply when foods are air-freighted. How do we know which foods came by plane? Annoyingly, there is no easy way to tell. I’ve been advocating for a long time for foods that have been air-freighted to have a small plane symbol on the packet. This is not hard to do, but would make our lives so much easier. Without an air-freight label, there are some general rules we can use. Companies will only choose flying if they need to get the food to us quickly. This means foods that have a very short shelf life and would perish within a few days of harvesting, mostly fruits and vegetables that begin to rot very quickly: items such as asparagus, green beans and berries.

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
by Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman
Published 2 Jan 1980

As one of their customers, Malcolm Richards, put it, "Quite frankly I don't know why the ICC is sitting on its hands doing nothing. This is the third time to my knowledge that we have supported the application of Dayton Air Freight to help us save money, help free enterprise, help the country save energy.... It all comes down to the consumer's ultimately going to pay for all this." One of the owners of Dayton Air Freight, Ted Hacker, adds: "As far as I'm concerned, there is no free enterprise in interstate commerce. It no longer exists in this country. You have to pay the price and you have to pay the price very dearly.

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It constitutes wealth for the people who own the certificates, but for the society as a whole it is a measure of the loss from government intervention, not a measure of productive capacity. Every study shows that the elimination of ICC regulation of trucking would drastically reduce costs to shippers—Moore estimates by perhaps as much as three-quarters. A trucking company in Ohio, Dayton Air Freight, offers a specific example. It has an ICC license that gives it exclusive permission to carry freight from Dayton to Detroit. To serve other routes it has had to buy rights from ICC license holders, including one who doesn't own a single truck. It has paid as much as $100,000 a year for the privilege.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - 30th Anniversary Edition
by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Published 1 Jun 2012

"Well, then there’s the added shipping cost,’’ she says. "Stacey, we’re talking a million dollars in business here,’’ I tell her. "Okay, but they’ll take at least three days to a week to get here by truck,’’ she says. "So why can’t we have them shipped air freight?’’ I ask. "They’re not very big parts.’’ "Well....’’ says Stacey. "Look into it, but I doubt if the air freight bill is going to eat up the profit on a million-dollar sale,’’ I tell her. "And if we can’t get these parts, we can’t get the sale.’’ "All right. I’ll see what they can do,’’ she says. At the end of the day, the details are still being sweated out, but we know enough for me to place a call to Jons.

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We’ll get seven hundred and one dollars, and we’ll pay three hundred and thirty-four dollars. That’s three hundred seventy-eight dollars to the bottom line per unit.’’ "It’s three hundred sixty-six ninety-three per unit, and you forgot the freight,’’ Lou corrects me. "Thank you. How much is the air freight per unit?’’ I ask Johnny. "I don’t remember, but it’s not more than thirty bucks.’’ "Can we see the details of that deal?’’ I ask him. "What I’m particularly interested in is the products, the quantities per month, and the prices.’’ Johnny gives me a long look and then turns to Dick, "Bring it.’’

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone
Published 10 May 2021

For the shipping companies, the online retailer generated increasing revenues while eroding the fat, double-digit profit margins that kept their investors happy and stock prices buoyant. UPS and FedEx tried to mitigate Amazon’s corrosive effects by levying surcharges and capping its use of their air freight networks over the holidays. Amazon executives didn’t appreciate that. Four employees from that time told me they heard Clark and other senior Amazon executives gripe about FedEx and say that its founder, Fred Smith, “surrounds himself with sycophants and has completely off-the-charts arrogance.”

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Executives were also undoubtedly aware that operating an airline would come with plenty of actual baggage: it could expose the company to a potentially belligerent pilots’ union, a surfeit of regulations, and an oversight authority, the FAA, that had a dim view of Silicon Valley–style corner-cutting and innovation. The solution they came up with, which Clark successfully proposed to the S-team, allowed Amazon to avoid those drawbacks. Like Amazon’s parallel initiatives on the ground, the plan called for controlling air freight while not necessarily owning it or exposing the company to the dangerous messiness of the aviation industry. The details provide a fascinating window into the self-amplifying advantages of Amazon’s size and power. Over the spring of 2016, Amazon announced it was leasing forty Boeing 767 freighters from a pair of airlines: ATSG, based in Wilmington, Ohio, and Atlas Air, based in Westchester County, New York.

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A&P, 350–51, 378 Aarstol, Stephan, 170, 374–75 Abercrombie & Fitch, 179 Academy Awards, 137, 322 Accel, 122 Ackerman, Neil, 33, 168 Acxiom, 252 Adams, Jeff, 27–28 Adobe, 252 advertising, 14, 72, 76, 82, 178, 246–59, 287, 379, 384 Amazon search and sponsored products, 254–59, 263 Amazon’s entry into, 250 banner, 246, 252, 253, 259 customer data and, 252 Google search, 82, 83, 85–87, 254, 255 in India, 86 in Mexico, 83 New York–based team for, 250–51 Product Ads service, 253 Super Bowl, 48, 283 Washington Post and, 130 Adzinia, 250 Aerojet Rocketdyne, 272 Affleck, Casey, 135, 137, 149 Agarwal, Amit, 71, 73–79, 86–87, 89, 93, 383 Agostini, Adrian, 170, 178 Airbnb, 96, 248 Air Force, U.S., 279 Albertsons Companies, 186, 210 Albrecht family, 196–97 Aldi Nord, 196–97 Alexa Prize, 52 Alfalfa Club, 322–23 Alibaba, 71–72, 76, 104, 171, 173, 177, 179, 248, 260, 379 AliExpress, 171–73 Alipay, 72 Allen, James, 262 Allen, Paul, 288 Allen, Woody, 13, 149, 152, 153 Allen & Company, 15, 244, 345 AlliedSignal, 8 Alphabet, 67, 320, 360–61 Alpha House, 142 Amazon advertising and, see advertising algorithms of, 58, 164–65, 260 Amazon’s Choice products on, 257–60 annual net sales and profit of, 19, 159, 263, 285 antitrust issues and, 9, 10, 174, 307, 351, 353, 363–80, 381, 406 bookselling business of, 5, 9, 249, 378, 405 Campfire retreat of, 153–55 corporate culture at, 10, 18, 21, 95, 108–11, 113–15, 119, 398, 402 CRaP (can’t realize a profit) problem at, 189–90, 194, 204, 212 criticism of, 14, 214, 349–57, 364, 382, 391, 393, 398, 403 customer reviews on, 178, 201 customers refunded by, 197 as “Day 1” company, 6, 12, 406 “Day 2” stasis feared at, 248, 261, 262 early years of, 5–12, 15 employees at, see Amazon employees flywheel (virtuous cycle) of, 8, 72, 163, 226, 245, 257 founding of, 5–6, 322 Google ads and, 82, 83, 85–87 growth and expansion of, 6, 8, 11–13, 17, 18, 80, 163, 263, 287–90, 292, 316, 349 Heartbeat database of, 201 HQ2, see HQ2 lawyers of, 113, 147, 202, 258–59, 368–69 leadership committee at, see Amazon S-team leadership principles of, 10, 21, 36, 40, 61, 310, 406 leverage pursued by, 163–64, 183, 241, 242, 288, 405 “license to operate” of, 291 market capitalization of, 14, 19, 94, 109, 115, 159, 245, 263, 285, 288, 306, 384 OP1 meetings at, 10, 47, 50, 75, 76, 86, 102, 167, 168, 170–71, 244–49, 259–60, 262, 319 OP2 meetings at, 10, 102 physical stores of, see Amazon Books; Amazon Go PR and policy department of, 352–53, 369, 399 PR FAQs at, 31, 57, 194, 204 prices lowered by, 365 private-label products of, see Amazon private-label products profitability of, 94–96, 163, 166, 260 quality versus quantity of products on, 169–70, 175, 177 Quidsi acquired by, 9–10, 193, 209, 222 R&D expenses of, 67 retreat and slowdown of, 260 Ring acquired by, 319, 367 search results on, 201, 254–57, 259, 374 sponsored products on, 254–57, 259 S-team at, see Amazon S-team stock of, see Amazon stock taxes and, 117–18, 291, 301, 303, 335, 351, 354–57, 364 third-party sellers on, see Amazon Marketplace transportation networks of, see Amazon transportation networks and logistics two-pizza teams at, 10, 49, 51, 205, 239 2015 as critical year for, 94 Vine program of, 201 Washington Post and, 117–21, 126, 130, 134, 357, 363 whistleblowers fired from, 397–99 Whole Foods acquired by, 14, 15, 69, 186–87, 209–12, 213, 287, 353, 366 wind farm of, 245 Zappos acquired by, 9, 15, 193, 211, 220, 222, 353 Amazon Air, 14, 214, 232–36 Atlas Air crash, 240 Amazon Alexa, 13, 14, 16, 23, 26–38, 42–53, 54, 58, 65, 67, 70, 93, 95, 102, 116, 144, 148, 158, 187, 193, 195, 207, 211, 244, 258, 261, 287, 289, 401, 404 AMPED and, 43–44 beta testers of, 33, 37, 42–44 Bezos’s sketch for, 20, 25 bugs in, 51–52 as Doppler project, 26–38, 40, 42–47 Evi and, 34–36 Fire tablet and, 44 language-specific versions of, 50 launch of, 44–46 name of, 32 Skills Kit, 47, 52 social cue recognition in, 34–35 speech recognition in, 28, 33, 36, 37 voice of, 27–30 Voice Service, 47 see also Amazon Echo Amazon Books, 64, 69, 336 Amazon Care, 404 Amazon Customer Excellence System (ACES), 218 Amazon Dash Carts, 64, 69 Amazon Echo, 12–13, 23–38, 42–53, 109, 206, 287 beta testers of, 33, 37 Bezos’s sketch for, 20, 25 bugs in, 51–52 design of, 32–33 as Doppler project, 26–38, 40, 42–47 Dot, 47, 50 launch of, 44–46 as music player, 30–31, 33 remote control for, 44–45 Show, 53 Tap, 47, 48 wake word for, 31–32 see also Amazon Alexa Amazon employees, 2, 4, 10, 109–15 appeal process for, 114 badges worn by, 21 Bezos and, 110–15 Career Choice program for, 220 compensation plans of, 112, 262 executive, leaving for rival company, 231–32 at fulfillment centers, 2, 7, 213–14, 219–22, 224, 236, 238, 288, 320, 351, 405 at fulfillment centers, Covid-19 and, 385–401 at fulfillment centers, pay increase for, 355–56 healthcare for, 16 leverage and, 164 managers, span of control of, 261–63 New York Times exposé on work environment of, 95, 109–11, 113–14, 119, 352 number of, 14, 19, 159, 285, 287–89, 292, 384 organizational rearrangement and, 261–62 parental leave program for, 114 Pay to Quit program for, 220 performance review system for, 114–15 on private-label teams, 200–203, 209, 258, 353, 368 recruiting difficulties and, 292 retail, hiring freeze on, 260 in Seattle, cap on number of, 304 stack ranking of, 110–12, 114, 219 turnover rate of, 109–10, 112 unions and, see labor unions Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, 4, 397 Amazon Fire Phone, 2, 13, 15, 22, 33, 38–42, 45, 46, 58, 70, 95, 189, 382 Amazon Fire tablet, 40, 44, 75, 126, 129, 251 Amazon Fire TV, 33, 42, 44 Amazon Flex, 238 Amazon Fresh, 69, 188–91, 196, 197, 204, 207, 208, 211, 222, 230, 241–43, 391 Amazon fulfillment centers (FCs; warehouses), 6, 8, 9, 11, 80, 97, 104, 165, 183, 194, 197, 213–14, 216, 241, 354 accident prevention at, 238 Covid-19 and, 385–401 employees at, 2, 7, 213–14, 219–22, 224, 236, 238, 288, 320, 351, 405 employees’ pay increase at, 355–56 Fulfillment by Amazon for third-party sellers, 165–71, 173, 389 in Lehigh Valley, summer conditions at, 220–21 non-sortable, 217–18 robots in, 213, 222–24, 388, 389 Amazon fulfillment network, see Amazon transportation networks and logistics Amazon Go, 13, 54–69, 70, 95, 102, 144, 148, 150, 158, 211, 244, 287, 404 Amazon headquarters in Seattle Blackfoot building, 99 Block 18, 303–4 Day 1 building, 150, 292, 303 Denny Triangle, 139 Fiona building, 25, 27 Otter building, 62, 65 Rainier Square Tower, 304 South Lake Union, 11–12, 21, 48, 99, 139, 288–89 Spheres, 150–51, 288, 289, 327, 381 Amazon India, 13, 70–71, 73–82, 86–93, 94, 95, 144, 148, 158, 287, 383–84 Amazon Kindle, 9, 14, 22, 23, 25–26, 27, 40, 55, 93, 116, 187, 211, 232 Fire tablet, 40, 44, 75, 126, 129, 251 Amazon Lockers, 211 Amazon Marketplace, 8, 13–14, 163, 165, 168–83, 187, 246, 254, 367–68, 376–79 Amazon Exclusives and, 170 Amazon Lending and, 170, 171, 375 Brand Registry and, 181 Chinese sellers on, 171–81, 183, 248, 254, 260, 287 counterfeit goods on, 13, 72, 177, 179–83, 370, 379 Covid-19 and, 389 data from sellers on, and Amazon’s private-label products, 201–3, 209, 353–54, 366, 368–71, 380 eBay and, 169 Fashion Seller Conference, 179–80 Fulfillment by Amazon and, 165–71, 173, 389 Project Zero and, 183 Seller Central and, 169, 172 sellers’ complaints about, 351, 367–68, 370–77, 405 unsafe products on, 177–78, 181, 379 Amazon Mexico, 80–85, 95, 144 Amazon Pharmacy, 404 Amazon Polly, 29 Amazon Prime, 8, 87, 104, 107, 109, 126, 138–39, 147–48, 158, 163, 165, 193, 211, 226, 227, 241–43, 263, 379, 384 Amazon Prime Day, 95, 104–9, 389 Amazon Prime Now, 194–98, 204, 205, 208, 211, 212, 213–14, 238, 241 Amazon Prime Pantry, 194 Amazon Prime Video, 48, 93, 136, 138–41, 143, 147–49, 152, 158, 183, 287, 401 Amazon private-label products, 198–205, 209, 211, 258–59 Basics, 199, 201, 203, 258, 372, 375, 378 Bloom Street, 198–200 Elements, 199, 200 employees on teams for, 200–203, 209, 258, 368 Essentials, 202 third-party seller data and, 201–3, 209, 353–54, 366, 368–71, 380 Wickedly Prime, 200 Amazon Restaurants, 260 Amazon S-team, 47, 73, 75, 80, 97, 98, 104, 105, 108, 113, 115, 156, 164, 168, 173, 181, 192, 195, 207, 214, 219–21, 224, 243, 246, 248, 262, 293, 294, 318, 336, 350, 352, 370, 402 advertising and, 249–51, 255–56 air freight and, 234 Alexa and, 50 Amazon Fresh and, 189 Amazon Go and, 55, 60, 62 Amazon private labels and, 200, 203 China-based sellers and, 174, 175 Covid-19 and, 386–87, 390 Herrington’s memo and, 189–90 HQ2 and, 298, 300–302, 305, 306, 315 India and, 80, 86–87 Smalls and, 395 warehouse worker pay and, 355–56 Amazon stock, 6, 7, 13, 15, 58, 94, 95, 103, 109, 210, 245, 262, 263, 288, 306, 384 Bezos divorce settlement and, 346 in Bezos’s funding of Blue Origin, 278 Bezos’s wealth and, 11, 15, 95, 112–13, 349 dual-class structure for, 320–21 taxes and, 354 Amazon Studios, 13, 14, 135–37, 141–58, 244, 322, 325, 326, 401 Bezos’s storytelling guidelines for, 151–52 Amazon Tap, 47, 48 Amazon transportation networks and logistics, 14, 212, 213–43, 287, 401 Amazon Air in, 14, 214, 232–36 Amazon Air crash and, 240 Amazon Logistics division, 228–31, 236, 239–42, 388, 402 Christmas fiasco at Worldport, 225–27, 232 crashes and, 237–38 delivery service partners (DSPs) in, 228–29, 236–41 delivery stations in, 230 drivers in, 14, 189, 191, 195, 211, 212, 214, 228–30, 236–41 drone program and, 233 fatal accidents and, 236–37 FedEx in, 226–28, 232, 233, 235, 242, 358 freight transporters in, 229 last-mile network in, 228, 241–42 Mosaic program of truck trailers in, 229 Prime air hub in, 235–36 Rabbit app in, 238–39 safety problems in, 236–40 sortation centers in, 14, 213, 227–29, 236 Sunday deliveries in, 227–28 UPS in, 14, 216–17, 225–28, 232, 233, 242, 358 USPS in, 227, 228, 242, 335, 351, 357–58 see also Amazon fulfillment centers Amazon Treasure Truck, 204–6, 209 Amazon Web Services (AWS), 8–9, 13, 24, 29, 37, 70, 79, 95–103, 109, 115, 144, 182, 249, 259, 261, 263, 287, 312, 320, 351, 359–60, 362, 363, 377, 379, 384, 398, 405 Covid-19 and, 401 culture at, 99–101 JEDI contract pursued by, 351, 359–63, 381 re:Invent conference of, 362 revenues and profits of, 96, 103–4 Ambani, Mukesh, 93, 384 American Astronomical Society, 277 American Media Inc.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

When it is simply assumed that ‘small is beautiful’, we can all too easily ignore the fact that the energy costs associated with producing food locally may well exceed the total costs of transporting it from a more suitable climate.80 Even for the purpose of assessing the contribution of food transportation, food miles are a poor metric. Air freight, for example, makes up a relatively small portion of total food miles, but it makes up a disproportionately large slice of total food-related CO2 emissions.81 The energy consumption involved in putting food on our plates is important, but it cannot be captured in anything as simple as food miles, or in the idea that ‘local is best’.

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Contexts 13: 3 (2014). 77.Miriam Glucksmann and Jane Nolan, ‘New Technologies and the Transformations of Women’s Labour at Home and Work’, Equal Opportunities International 26: 2 (20 February 2007). 78.Will Boisvert, ‘An Environmentalist on the Lie of Locavorism’, New York Observer, 16 April 2013. 79.Alison Smith, Paul Watkiss, Geoff Tweddle, Alan McKinnon, Mike Browne, Alistair Hunt, Colin Treleven, Chris Nash and Sam Cross, The Validity of Food Miles as an Indicator of Sustainable Development: Final Report (London: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2005). 80.Caroline Saunders, Andrew Barber and Greg Taylor, Food Miles: Comparative Energy/Emissions Performance of New Zealand’s Agriculture Industry, Agribusiness and Economics Research Unit, Lincoln University, Canterbury, NZ, July 2006, pdf available at lincoln.ac.nz. 81.In the UK in 2005, air freight made up just 1 per cent of food tonne miles travelled, but 11 per cent of food-related emissions. Smith et al., Validity of Food Miles, p. 3. 82.Doug Henwood, ‘Moving Money (Revisited)’, LBO News, 2010, at lbo-news.com. 83.Stephen Gandel, ‘By Every Measure, the Big Banks Are Bigger’, Fortune, 13 September 2013, at fortune.com. 84.Victoria McGrane and Tan Gillian, ‘Lenders Are Warned on Risk’, Wall Street Journal, 25 June 2014. 85.OTC Derivatives Statistics at End-June 2014, Basel: Bank for International Settlements, 2014, p. 2, at bis.org. 86.David Boyle, A Local Banking System: The Urgent Need to Reinvigorate UK High Street Banking (London: New Economics Foundation, 2011), p. 8. 87.Ibid., pp. 8–9. 88.Giles Tremlett, ‘Spain’s Savings Banks’ Culture of Greed, Cronyism, and Political Meddling’, Guardian, 8 June 2012. 89.Boyle, Local Banking System, p. 10. 90.Andrew Bibby, ‘Co-op Bank Crisis: What Next for the Co-operative Sector?’

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High
by Mike Power
Published 1 May 2013

The United States has a different method of legislating around designer drugs, one which bans compounds on the loosely defined basis of their effects and similarity to banned drugs, which is discussed in full in the next chapter. But subtle or not, all of these laws were written in an era before mass communications – before most homes even had a telephone line or a colour television, when news came a few times a day on screens and twice a day on paper. They were drafted in an age when air freight costs were prohibitively high for individuals, in an age when communication with distant, communist China was so slow as to be impossible. When they were created, computers were room-sized, and were owned in the main by governments. They were first written, that is to say, almost half a century before the web was born.

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Mephedrone is chemically related to khat, or Catha edulis, a plant used for thousands of years in Arabic cultures, especially in Yemen and Somalia, as a social lubricant enjoyed for its stimulating qualities when chewed in a quid held in the cheek. Many shops in east London, home to immigrants from khatusing countries, sell the plant, which is legal and imported by established firms. It is brought in daily by air freight as it loses potency when less than perfectly fresh. The active ingredient, cathinone, is, if isolated and sold as a pure compound, a banned substance in most of Europe and is a Class C drug in the UK. Khat is banned in the US and some European countries, such as Holland, and its legality in the UK seems anomalous.

One Up on Wall Street
by Peter Lynch
Published 11 May 2012

Between the caddying and a scholarship I’d covered my tuition, living at home reduced my other expenses, and I had already upgraded myself from an $85 car to a $150 car. After all the tips that I’d had to ignore, I finally was rich enough to invest! Flying Tiger was no wild guess. I picked it on the basis of some dogged research into a faulty premise. In one of my classes I’d read an article on the promising future of air freight, and it said that Flying Tiger was an air freight company. That’s why I bought the stock, but that’s not why the stock went up. It went up because we got into the Vietnam War and Flying Tiger made a fortune shunting troops and cargo in and out of the Pacific. In less than two years Flying Tiger hit $32¾ and I had my first five-bagger.

Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America
by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall
Published 1 Jan 1991

Robinette saw Terrell as a possible “ serious threat to us based on the foregoing.” 10 Robinette’s July 17 memo corroborates Terrell’s own story that Robinette tried to silence Terrell by offering funds for a proposed helicopter service business in Costa Rica. It recommends that Robinette’s “interest” in this project be increased: “The ‘investors’ would require that he reduce or stop his ‘political talking’ as it would ‘affect our investment.’ ” The memo concludes that by this means “ the chopper or air freight service in Costa Rica” could be “connected to some future non-commercial work” ; and that “we would have him [Terrell] in hand and somewhat in our control.” 11 On the basis o f Robinette’s second memo, North prepared a memo for Admiral Poindexter, calling Terrell a “terrorist threat” and focusing at the outset on Terrell’s role in the Christie Institute suit, in media stories on Contra drug running, and in providing information to Senator Kerry’s staff.

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Fernandez, Joseph (“Tomas Castillo” ): CIA station chief in Costa Rica Frigorificos de Puntarenas: A shrimp company in Costa Rica allegedly created as a cover for the laundering o f drug money; it was involved in North’s Contra support operations and used by the State Department to deliver humanitarian Contra aid Garcia Meza, Luis: Bolivian general who organized and came to power through 1980 Cocaine Coup; CAL conference participant the same year Gonzalez, Sebastian “ Guachan” : ARDE Contra official who fled Costa Rica in 1984 after indictment for drug trafficking Harari, Michael: Former Israeli Mossad agent who trained Manuel Noriega’s bodyguards and arranged arms shipments in the region Hondu Carib: A small air freight company, suspected o f drug smuggling, which flew supplies to the Contras Hull, John: American rancher in Costa Rica who backed Contras in conjunction with the local CIA station and whose airfield received Contra supply flights and allegedly drug shipments Kalish, Steven: American marijuana trafficker close to Noriega in Panama Kattan Kassin, Isaac: Major Colombian money launderer for Cali cartel Kiszynski, George: Veteran Miami counterterrorism agent for the FBI who investigated Corvo case with Kevin Currier and forwarded copies o f his cables to Washington for Oliver North Latchinian, Gerard: International arms dealer, former business partner o f Felix Rodriguez and Mossad agent Pesakh Ben-Or, convicted for his part in 1984 Bueso Rosa cocaine plot Lehder, Carlos: Colombian drug trafficker and admirer o f Hitler, extradited to United States and convicted Names and Organizations / 261 MAS (Muerte a Secuestradores): “ Death to Kidnappers,” Colombian antiguerrilla death squad organization founded in December 1981 by members o f Medellin cartel, Cali cartel, and Colombia military Matta Ballesteros, Juan Ramon: Honduran drug trafficker with important drug connections in Mexico, Cali, and the Honduran army Morales, George (Jorge): Convicted Colombian drug smuggler; testified to shipping arms to Contras for drugs in return for alleged promises o f official protection NHAO (Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Organization): State Department office established to deliver humanitarian aid to the Contras NNBIS (National Narcotics Border Interdiction System): Coordinated U.S. interagency antidrug effort launched in 1983 under Vice President George Bush Nazar Haro, Miguel: Head o f Mexican DFS (Direccion Federal de Seguridad), important CIA asset and known protector o f Mexican drug traffickers Noriega, Manuel: Panamanian general and dictator indicted for protecting drug shipments and laundering money; involved with Floyd Carlton, Oliver North, the Contras, and the CIA Nunez, Moises Dagoberto: Officer o f Frigorificos de Puntarenas who worked with Joe Fernandez and Robert Owen on anti-Sandinista operation for North OSG-TIWG (Operations Sub-Group/Terrorist International Working Group): Secret counterterrorist working group cochaired by Oliver North in the National Security Council and used by him against drug witness Jack Terrell Ocampo Zuluaga, Santiago: Associate o f Cali cartel kingpin Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela; president o f MAS; indicted in 1980 Ochoa Vasquez, Jorge Luis: Leader o f Medellin cartel, indicted in United States in 1984 and 1986; arrested in Spain in 1984 and extradited to Colombia, freed on $10,500 bail Owen, Robert: Intermediary between Oliver North, the Contras, and their supporters in Latin America, like John Hull Pastora, Eden: Contra leader in Costa Rica opposed by John Hull and FDN PIP (Peruvian Investigative Police): Peru’s elite, and corrupt, police agency assigned to combat drug trafficking but penetrated by drug traffickers; responsible for atrocities against peasants and human rights workers Parry, Robert: Associated Press journalist who helped break the Contra drug story Posey, Tom: American mercenary who collaborated briefly with John Hull, Robert Owen, and Jack Terrell on Contra support operations 262 / Names and Organizations Revell, Oliver: Executive Assistant Director o f the FBI with responsibility for counterterrorism matters; regularly attended OSG-TIWG meetings Robinette, Glenn: Ex-CIA private investigator engaged by Richard Sccord and paid with proceeds from Iran-Contra arms sales to investigate Christie Institute witnesses such as Jack Terrell; worked with Moises Nunez and Robert Owen Rodriguez, Cesar: Panamanian arms and drugs trafficker under Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega; killed in Colombia in 1986 Rodriguez, Felix: Ex-CIA agent and former business partner o f Gerard Latchinian; given Contra support role at Ilopango Air Force base in El Salvador after intervention by former CIA colleague Donald Gregg o f Vice President Bush’s office Rodriguez, Luis: Owner o f Frigorificos de Puntarenas, indicted on drug charges that were later dropped Rodriguez Gacha, Gonzalo: Drug trafficker in Medellin cartel; killed in 1990 Rodriguez Orejuela, Gilberto: Kingpin o f Colombian Cali cartel; arrested with Jorge Ochoa in Spain in 1984 and extradited to Colombia, where he was later freed SETCO (Servicios Turisticos): Airline established by Honduran cocaine trafficker Juan Matta Ballesteros and used by the FDN and State Department to deliver supplies to the Contras Sanchez, Aristides: Contra leader whose relatives supplied cocaine in the San Francisco Frogman case Seal, Adler Berriman (“ Barry”): Convicted drug smuggler who took photographs allegedly showing Sandinista official Federico Vaughan and Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar loading cocaine onto Seal’s plane Sicilia Falcon, Alberto: Miami Cuban, allegedly trained as a U.S. government agent, who in 1972 emerged as a trafficker o f drugs through Mexico Singlaub, John: Ex-OSS and CIA officer, later a U.S. army general, who became head o f the U.S. chapter o f WACL and a supplier to the Contras Spadafora, Hugo: Panamanian enemy o f Noriega who was murdered in 1985 after talking to U.S. officials about drug trafficking in Costa Rica Suarez Gomez, Roberto: Bolivian cocaine trafficker until arrested in 1988 after falling out with Colombian cartels Suarez Mason, Carlos Guillermo: Argentine general and P2 member who oversaw Argentine death squads and drug-financed activities that were coordinated through CAL Tambs, Lewis: U.S.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
by Christopher Mims
Published 13 Sep 2021

A typical semitrailer truck can go 2,000 miles on the 300 gallons of diesel it carries, and it can refuel in under half an hour. This means an autonomous truck could travel from Los Angeles to Florida in two days. Trucks that never stop rolling would be a game changer for transportation planners in any number of ways. The most expensive way to ship goods is by air freight, and trucks that could roll 24/7 could take a substantial portion of the packages that currently must be transferred to planes. They could allow logistics companies to build larger fulfillment and distribution centers farther from the secondary and tertiary sortation warehouses they feed. They could compete with rail on price and planes on speed.

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These networks are older and, collectively, bigger than those of even mighty Amazon. UPS, founded in 1907, has been building its network for over a hundred years. FedEx, while founded in 1971, has grown nearly as large. The two companies are, as of 2020, closely matched in both revenue and the scale of their respective networks. UPS has for the most part caught up to FedEx in air freight, and FedEx has mostly caught up to UPS in ground shipping. UPS is still about half again larger than FedEx by overall shipping volume, delivering 4.7 billion packages in 2020 to FedEx’s 3 billion. The reason their revenues are nearly the same is that FedEx earns better margins moving more high-value overnight packages.

Dead or Alive
by Tom Clancy and Grant (CON) Blackwood
Published 7 Dec 2010

More took the train south, which was cheaper and more accessible to the local citizens. Aeroflot hadn’t quite shaken its long-held reputation for substandard flight safety. But there was a rather more active air-freight terminal, used largely for fish that needed swift transport to various international restaurants. And so the package was loaded into the forward cargo hatch of a forty-year-old DC-8 belonging to Asin Air Freight. It would fly to Stockholm, and from there, with a new crew, it would fly farther south, stopping at Athens before its final leg to Dubai International Airport in the United Arab Emirates. “What’s this?”

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A gas-powered forklift hoisted the package—it weighed about seven hundred kilos—and drove it to the platform sitting outside the cargo hatch. There it was manhandled aboard and tied down firmly to the aluminum deck. The pilot and copilot were preflighting the aircraft, walking around, checking for fluid leaks, visually inspecting the airframe for anything amiss. The air-freight business was not known for the quality of its maintenance procedures, and the flyers, whose lives rode on the flight deck, did their best to make up for that troubling fact. The left outboard main-gear tire needed replacement in ten or so cycles. Aside from that, the airplane looked as though it would fly for the next eight hours.

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
by Marc Levinson
Published 1 Jan 2006

The requirements were not easy to reconcile: air containers needed to be stronger than maritime containers, and they required smooth bottoms to travel on conveyor belts rather than corner fittings for lifting by cranes. After months of studies, it dawned on the engineers that shippers paying a premium for the speed of air freight would be unlikely to want their cargo carried in ships, and a separate standard was developed for air containers. Railroads raised a more serious problem, contending that containers needed heavier end walls. End walls bore no great loads when the containers were on ships, but the braking of a train could cause the end of a container to bump up against the end of the flatcar.

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By one estimate, each day seaborne goods spend under way raises the exporter’s costs by 0.8 percent, which means that a typical 13-day voyage from China to the United States has the same effect as a 10 percent tariff. The time savings represent a huge competitive advantage to shippers located near a major port. Those served by smaller ports may have to endure longer wait times between ships or shuttle links to a larger port, adding time, and hence costs, to every shipment. Air freight all but eliminates the costs of time, but it is too expensive for most goods that are made in poor countries precisely because little value is added in their production.10 “Any change in technology,” the economist Joel Mokyr observed, “leads almost inevitably to an improvement in the welfare of some and to a deterioration in that of others.”

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor
by William Easterly
Published 4 Mar 2014

The Rwandan coffee innovators chose to use another engine-powered vehicle that bypassed surrounding countries: an airplane. Air-freight companies charge more per ton than ocean freight. This helps explain why Rwandan coffee exporters chose to shift to the high end of the coffee-quality ladder. High-end coffee has a high value-to-weight ratio (Rwandan coffee goes for as much as $24 per pound), meaning that costly air shipping does not destroy profits. The flexibility of specialization sometimes allows occasional compensation for some areas that are still technologically backward. Other export successes by air freight in Africa are cut flowers (and of course coffee) from Kenya and Ethiopia, and fresh fish shipped frozen from Uganda and Tanzania.45 CONCLUSION Technology is another spontaneous order, like markets, and these two spontaneous orders interact with each other.

The Cleaner: The True Story of One of the World's Most Successful Money Launderers
by Bruce Aitken
Published 2 Mar 2017

It did not take long for Brink to turn the “Magic Money Movement” into a gigantic “Mother of All Laundries.” It was sensible. Since we were already shipping huge amounts of foreign currency all around the world, millions of Japanese yen, millions of Philippine pesos, Swiss francs, deutsche marks and pounds sterling by insured air freight, why should sending dollars back to America be different? Brink’s brilliant “light bulb” had turned on again! Hey Brink! Use Brink’s… It seemed only natural. Brink’s armored car transport service had just opened in Hong Kong, and we would become a valued account. They would deal with customs and airport handling formalities, and door-to-door services with full liability coverage.

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Both bright and kind-hearted, he did, however, live life on the edge and seemed to thrive under stress and great pressure. At first, I did not know what was causing the stress, but I soon found out. Rumors from mutual friends connected Robert to Thai marijuana smuggling. Specifically, transporting to America and England, and transported by the quickest of means—air freight. Personally, I had no interest in knowing the truth, except I often felt that while visiting Bangkok, I should stay at a hotel rather than at his nice Thai house. Then it happened. Thank God I was not in Bangkok on October 20, 1980, when the Thai National Police seized approximately three thousand two hundred kilos of marijuana and twenty kilos of hashish, and arrested eight people at Nick’s residence.

Makers at Work: Folks Reinventing the World One Object or Idea at a Time
by Steven Osborn
Published 17 Sep 2013

The 3D printer movement is awesome, but I still don’t see 3D printers—you know, a homemade 3D printer still isn’t practical when I need to make twelve hundred cases for Digisparks that I’ve sold. So the laser cutter still wins there. I have two laser cutters, and one of them is a big, giant one that we air-freighted from China. It’s a beast. It’s a great machine, but I’ve seen a lot of these homemade laser systems—on BuildLog and other sites—coming up, and I think that’s really cool. Osborn: I bought a Full Spectrum 40-watt hobby laser recently. Haven’t made anything exciting with it just yet. Kettenburg: I have that one.

…

I don’t manufacture my own projects, so I don’t have a lot of familiarity with manufacturing tools, but I thought knowing the tools and knowing how they work would make me a better designer. There are shippers at what I call “shipper row” or “shipper alley,” just garages of people with boxes and tape. You can take your stuff, and they’ll put it in a box, tape it up and send it anywhere in the world, by FedEx or air freight or boat. I went down there, I compared prices, and I found somebody who would FedEx a twenty-kilo box to Europe, airfreight, in three days or four days. It was like $3 US a kilo, at twenty kilos. So I bought reflow ovens, I bought hot plates, I bought a pick-and-place machine, I bought all the tools of the trade, and took them down to shipper row.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity
by Martin J. Rees
Published 14 Oct 2018

The 2009 crash of an Air France plane, en route from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, in the South Atlantic demonstrates what can go wrong: the pilots took too long to resume control when there was an emergency and mistakenly aggravated the problem. On the other hand, suicidal pilots have actually caused devastating crashes that the autopilot couldn’t prevent. Will the public ever be relaxed about boarding a plane with no pilot? I doubt it. But pilotless planes may be acceptable for air freight. Small delivery drones have a promising future; indeed, in Singapore, there are plans to replace delivery vehicles at ground level with drones flying above the streets. But even for these, we are too complacent about the risk of collisions, especially if they proliferate. For ordinary cars, software errors and cyberattacks cannot be ruled out.

Quality Investing: Owning the Best Companies for the Long Term
by Torkell T. Eide , Lawrence A. Cunningham and Patrick Hargreaves
Published 5 Jan 2016

Some move to self-service maintenance or increase use of non-original spare parts. Companies can become more inclined to buy equipment or services from second tier providers, sacrificing reliability for cost. If these changes were transient they would not necessarily pose a big problem, but they often become permanent. A recent example occurred in the air-freight industry. Over recent decades, many companies developed the habit of shipping certain goods by air, which is faster but far more costly than shipping by sea. When the global financial crisis hit, many shifted back to sea freight. They found that, with minor adjustments, their supply chain could function equally well with a substantially smaller component of goods shipped by air.

How Will You Measure Your Life?
by Christensen, Clayton M. , Dillon, Karen and Allworth, James
Published 15 May 2012

Worse, Honda discovered that its bikes leaked oil when subjected to the long drives at high speeds that were typical in America. This was a real problem; Honda’s dealers in America did not have the capability to repair such complicated problems and Honda had to spend what precious few resources it had in America to air-freight these faulty motorcycles back to Japan to fix them. In spite of the problems, Honda persisted with its original strategy—even as it was draining the U.S. division of virtually all its cash. In addition to the large bikes it sold, Honda had initially shipped a few of its smaller motorcycles to Los Angeles; but no one really expected American customers to buy them.

Year's Best SF 15
by David G. Hartwell; Kathryn Cramer
Published 15 Aug 2010

I don’t know what hunger feels like, but I’m absolutely sure that it isn’t as bad as lying empty in a dark garage, not knowing where your next load’s coming from, or when. Artificial photosynthesis has guaranteed the fuel supply forever, which is far more important than putting an end to global warming, although you wouldn’t know it from the way politicians go on.” “So you’re not worried about the renaissance of air freight?” Tom had asked. “Air freight!” Silas echoed, with a baritone growl that sounded not unlike his weary engine. “Silly frippery. As long as there’s goods to be shifted, there’ll be roads on which to shift them. Roads are the essence of civilization—and the essence of law and morality is the Highway Code. There’s no need to be afraid of air traffic, youngster.

Let My People Go Surfing
by Yvon Chouinard
Published 20 Jun 2006

* * * THE ENVIRONMENTAL COST OF TRANSPORTATION Our environmental assessment program showed us that the single greatest use of energy in the life span of a product is transportation. For example, a Patagonia shirt requires roughly 110,000 BTUs of energy to manufacture, from acquiring raw materials to making the fabric to sewing a finished shirt. Shipping that item air freight from Ventura to Boston, in a package with eighteen other shirts, takes another 50,000 BTUs per shirt. In other words, it takes half again as much fossil fuel energy to move it once than it did to make it. This brings up several considerations. One, we should be producing locally whenever possible.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
by Steven Levy
Published 18 May 2010

You can’t bullshit a computer, God damn it, the bit is there or the bit ain’t there.” He knew of the act of creation that is a natural outgrowth of working with the computer with a hacker’s obsessive passion. “It’s where every man can be a god,” Les Solomon would say. So he was eager to see Ed Roberts’ machine. Ed Roberts sent him the only prototype via air freight, and it got lost in transit. The only prototype. So Solomon had to look at the schematics, taking Roberts’ word that the thing worked. He believed. One night, he flippantly asked his daughter what might be a good name for this machine, and she mentioned that on the TV show Star Trek that evening, the good ship Enterprise was rocketing off to the star called Altair.

…

Melen and Garland had done articles outlining hobbyist projects for the magazine in their spare time, and were just putting to bed an article telling how to build a TV camera control device. Melen noticed a strange box on Solomon’s desk and asked what it was. Solomon informed him that the box, the prototype Altair that Ed Roberts had sent to replace the one lost in air freight, was an 8080 microcomputer that sold for under four hundred dollars. Roger Melen did not think that such a thing was possible, and Les Solomon told him that if he doubted it, he should call Ed Roberts in Albuquerque. Melen did this without hesitation, and arranged to make a stopover on his way back West.

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
by Paul Collier
Published 26 Apr 2007

In other words, a condition might be that the country should adhere to the international charters on democracy and budget transparency that I proposed in Chapter 9. Our trade policy does not have that much traction for the development of the landlocked because of the natural barrier of transport costs. However, especially for the countries of the Sahel, which, though landlocked, are close to Europe, air freight offers a potential lifeline into European markets. The key export products are likely to be high-value horticulture, and so European trade policy does matter. Breaking the Reform Impasse in Failing States Countries with bad governance and policies do sometimes turn themselves around, but too often it is like waiting for Godot.

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization
by Jeff Rubin
Published 19 May 2009

That colleague or client on the other side of the ocean whom you see regularly for meetings or sales calls is going to become a bit more of a stranger as teleconferencing and email replace face-to-face contact. We will be farther and farther away from parts of the planet that today seem right around the corner. Put less vacation travel, less business travel and less air freight together, and all those newly built airports, like the new terminal in Toronto or the planned third runway and sixth terminal at London’s Heathrow, will soon become gleaming mausoleums to a past age of cheap and abundant energy. The tourism and recreation industry’s ability to weather soaring fuel costs will come down to one factor.

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
by Andrew Blum
Published 28 May 2012

On the quiet Saturday afternoon of the Labor Day weekend in 1969, a small crowd of computer science graduate students had gathered in the courtyard of Boelter Hall with a bottle of champagne. Standing in the same spot, I conjured the scene. The occasion was the arrival of their grand and expensive new gadget, coming that day from Boston by air freight: a modified and military-hardened version of a Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputer—“mini,” at the time, meaning a machine that weighed nine hundred pounds and cost $80,000, the equivalent of nearly $500,000 today. It was traveling from the Cambridge, Massachusetts, engineering firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, possessor of a $1 million Department of Defense contract to build an experimental computer network, known as the ARPANET.

Dispatches
by Michael Herr
Published 1 Jan 1977

The trip back to the press center in Danang could take two hours or two days, depending on what was flying, but it was certain to go faster with Stone along because he had friends at every airfield and chopper pad in I Corps. Danang was Soul City for many of us, it had showers and drinks, flash-frozen air-freighted steaks, air-conditioned rooms and China Beach and, for Stone, a real home—a wife, a dog, a small house full of familiar possessions. Mutter’s Ridge had sickening heat, a rapidly vanishing water supply and boredom, so there really wasn’t any choice. Judging by the weathered, blackened bits of ammunition casing (theirs and ours) that littered the ground around us, the ridge also had a history, and Dana had told us something about it.

CultureShock! Egypt: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette (4th Edition)
by Susan L. Wilson
Published 20 Dec 2011

Egypt power strips. If you do this, then you will only need to buy a voltage transformer. You can buy one in Cairo. Some people prefer to purchase everything in Egypt; use your judgement based on your budget and length of stay. Remember, if you import appliances under temporary admission in your air freight, you are supposed to take them out of Egypt at the end of your stay even if they no longer work. So don’t throw away those broken appliances if you import them this way. Bring lots and lots of plastic storage bags, ties and sandwich bags. Ziplock bags are not available in many places. Measuring spoons and cups are not in cups or ounces, so if you cannot make the transition to metric, you should definitely bring these.

Miss Wyoming
by Douglas Coupland
Published 14 Mar 2000

The sky was darkening, and she toweled herself dry, put on Karen Calvin's terry robe and re-turned to the kitchen, where she heated a can of cream-of-mushroom soup. Once the soup was ready, she took it and a boxof Goldfish crackers into the living room to watch TV. Wouldthe neighbors see the lights and suspect an intruder? Shepushed the thought away. The neighborhood seemed to havebeen air-freighted in from the Fox lot, specifically designed forpeople who didn't want community, and she suspected shecould probably crank up a heavy metal album to full volumeand nobody would bat an eye. The local news teams were out in force, and Susan wasn't surprised when an old news service head shot of herself ap-peared on screen behind the anchor's head.

Space 2.0
by Rod Pyle
Published 2 Jan 2019

Jim infuses his space illustrations with a sense of optimism and a dynamic flair that is rare in this field, and he speaks to the viewer’s heart as few can. Edwin Sahakian is one of the book’s key financial supporters and is credited as such, but he is also a newfound friend with a deep interest in the future of space exploration. Owner of a very successful air freight company, Edwin was among the first to step forward when we began the search for underwriting for this important project. His enthusiasm for aerospace and spaceflight is infectious and has doubtless inspired the many students he teaches in his second career as an academician. To the many folks engaged in opening the space frontier as professionals who generously granted me time for interviews, my deepest thanks.

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets
by Michael Blastland
Published 3 Apr 2019

In wondering why, John Crabbe’s paper is admirably frank: ‘We were incapable of making even our three labs do things in exactly the same way,’ he writes. The detail he goes into about the differences is exhaustive. You won’t easily keep track of this, but you’ll get the idea: For mice sent to Portland and Edmonton from the eastern United States, they of course went by air freight, but those for Albany travelled by truck. Shipping to Edmonton always required a trip of 2 to 3 full days, versus 1 day for Albany. At the last minute when the second shipment in March was to occur, we learned that one supplier could not deliver mice of one group. . . Fortunately, surplus animals had been bred in Edmonton and Portland.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

The steam engine, the cotton gin, fishing trawlers – these technologies have contributed so spectacularly to growth not because money springs forth from them automatically, but because they have enabled capital to bring ever-greater swathes of nature into production. Innovations like containerisation and air freight contribute to growth because they enable goods to be transported from the point of extraction or production to the point of consumption more quickly. This even applies to seemingly immaterial innovations like Facebook’s algorithms, which contribute to growth by allowing advertisers to get people to consume things they otherwise wouldn’t.

Badvertising
by Andrew Simms

At the football clashes at Wembley Stadium in London during UEFA’s Euros 2020 (which due to Covid-19 actually happened in 2021), there were many prominent flashing pitch-side advertisements from high-carbon sponsors. They included ones for Qatar Airways, the international airline that recently became the largest air-freight carrier in the world: ‘QATAR AIRWAYS – FLY GREENER’. We made this spurious message the subject of a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK, but they sidestepped it, claiming that they had no authority over ads in that context, and referred us instead to Ofcom and UEFA – a common pattern of passing the buck for those of us seeking accountability for misleading green claims by polluting companies.

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History
by Stephen D. King
Published 22 May 2017

Admittedly, train travel is not without its complications: most obviously, the various national railways do not share a common gauge, and so containers have to be transferred from one train to another at border crossings (although sophisticated versions of this seemingly cumbersome process can complete the task in less than an hour). Other complications have, however, largely been removed: a combination of cross-border customs agreements and bonded containers means that the whole journey should be completed without a customs hitch (or bribe). Relative to air freight, the train is cheap. Relative to ocean freight, the train is quick. It can take around 60 days to shift goods from inland Chinese cities to the coast and then take them by ship to European markets. For high-street fashion and consumer electronics, that simply isn’t fast enough. The train takes a quarter of the time.

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe
by Greg Ip
Published 12 Oct 2015

The costs of the biggest disruption to European aviation since the Second World War were staggering. Tourists and business travelers canceled, altered, or postponed travel. BMW and Nissan temporarily suspended auto production at plants in Germany, Japan, and the United States because of a shortage of air-freighted parts. Three-quarters of Europe’s imports of fresh-cut flowers come by air; the shutdown cost thousands of flower growers in Latin America and Africa jobs or wages. Stranded passengers spent an aggregate eight thousand years away from home and work. All told, a study commissioned by Airbus put the total cost to the global economy at $4.7 billion.

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization
by Richard Baldwin
Published 14 Nov 2016

Figure 24 displays several ICT indicators, showing that there was an inflection point in the growth of Internet hosts in 1985 and in telephone subscribers in 1995. The ICT revolution, however, was not the only big change in this time frame. The development of air cargo both stimulated and was stimulated by the development of international production networks. Air Cargo Air freight first became commercially viable due to the surplus of planes available after World War II, but it did not really get going until the mid-1980s with the rise of Federal Express, DHL, and UPS. Indeed the development of reliable air cargo services mirrors the rise of global value chains for rather obvious reasons.

Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy
by Lawrence Ingrassia
Published 28 Jan 2020

Amazon’s chief financial officer, Brian Olsavsky, said that Amazon would spend $800 million in the second quarter of 2019 alone “to evolve the two-day free shipping program into a one-day free shipping program.” In the summer of 2019, in a sign that it views Amazon increasingly as a competitor and not just a customer, FedEx said it planned to stop providing its ground-delivery service as well as its Express Air Freight service in the United States to Amazon. Retail rivals of Amazon are frantically fighting back as well—in some cases by poaching Amazon logistics executives. In 2016, Target stores lured away Arthur Valdez, who rose through the ranks in a sixteen-year career at Amazon to become a vice president overseeing supply chain and transportation.

Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition
by Nicholas Pileggi

Then he called Pittsburgh and told Mazzei to send him a hundred pounds more. Within a month Henry began wholesaling uppers, Quaaludes, some cocaine, and a little heroin. Soon he had a drug crew of his own, including Bobby Germaine, a stickup man who was on the lam and pretending to be a freelance writer; Robin Cooperman, a clerical worker at an air freight company, who soon became Henry’s girlfriend; and Judy Wicks, a courier who never made a delivery unless she was wearing a pink-and-blue hat. In addition, Henry started a little sideline operation in automatic rifles and pistols, which he bought from one of his Quaalude users and part-time distributors who worked in a Connecticut armory.

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley
by Atsuo Inoue
Published 18 Nov 2021

Son ended up dispatching the cabinets back to the US not by ship, but by air, another case of his unique genius at play. The cabinets were left over from the démodé Space Invader boom in Japan, so your average company would have sent them by sea; in Son’s case, he deliberately chose the more expensive air freight. Taking into account customs procedures, it would take about three days for them to arrive, but had they been sent by ship, it would have taken three months – by which time he would have had to pay for them. Anyone else doing this would have fallen at the first hurdle, but Son’s business sense was too sharp and his thinking as far removed from ordinary as possible, whilst still keeping a cool, lucid, budget-minded outlook.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common
by Alan Greenspan
Published 14 Jun 2007

What they were telling us now was that all across the country people had stopped spending on everything except items bought in preparation for possible additional attacks: sales of groceries, security devices, bottled water, and insurance were up; the whole travel, entertainment, hotel, tourism, and convention business was down. We knew the shipping of fresh vegetables from the West Coast to the East Coast would be disrupted by the suspension of air freight, but we were somewhat surprised by how quickly many other businesses were hit. For example, the flow of auto parts from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit's plants slowed to a crawl at the river crossings that join the two cities—a factor in the decision by Ford Motor to shut down temporarily five of its factories.

…

Years earlier, many manufactures More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. T H E AGE OF T U R B U L E N C E ers had shifted to "just-in-time" production—instead of stockpiling parts and supplies at the plant, they relied on air freight to deliver critical components as they were needed. The shutdown of the airspace and the tightening of borders led to shortages, bottlenecks, and canceled shifts. In the meantime, the U.S. government had gone into high gear. On Friday, September 14, Congress passed an initial emergency appropriation of $40 billion and authorized the president to use force against the "nations, organizations, or persons" who had attacked us.

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
by James Risen
Published 15 Feb 2014

According to sources who were involved with the company, Alarbus received a secret, multimillion-dollar annual contract to conduct intelligence operations for Special Operations Command. They then set up another company, Jerash Air Cargo (JACO), based in Amman, Jordan, as a front company through which they could conduct intelligence operations. On the surface, Jerash was an Amman-based air freight company, and Nazem Houchaimi was the head of the firm. But the business was really an intelligence front, and Houchaimi was working for Asimos, Alarbus, and U.S. Special Operations Command. To help set up JACO, Asimos directed that $300,000 be transferred from Alarbus to Houchaimi in May 2008, according to an e-mail from Asimos.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon
Published 1 Jan 1996

After debating for a couple of days, Heart decreed that it should go by air, and that Ben Barker should go with it. A commercial flight was out of the question. The modified Honeywell 516—now officially BBN Interface Message Processor Number One—was just too big for the cargo bay of a passenger plane. It had to go out by air freight. Had Heart been able to, he would have put Barker straight into the cargo plane’s hold with his wrist handcuffed to the IMP. Never mind that he had chosen the machine precisely because it was battle-hardened; the rigors of combat were nothing compared to the punishment airline freight handlers could dish out.

The Weather of the Future
by Heidi Cullen
Published 2 Aug 2010

But soda pop, for example, is not subsidized. “A can of pop can be $5,” Gearheard says, “especially when you get into summer and supplies are dwindling. The supply ship only comes once a year.” As a result, Gearheard and her husband, along with many families in Clyde River and throughout the Arctic, have come to rely on a commercial air freight service called Food Mail that is based in Quebec.7 “They basically do your shopping for you. You send a list by e-mail or fax and they shop it all up and get it together and package it,” Gearheard says. Food Mail has a contract with the Canadian government, which subsidizes the service. “So you send in your list on Monday and it comes on Thursday,” explains Gearheard.

Deep Sea and Foreign Going
by Rose George
Published 4 Sep 2013

Travelling more slowly through water reduces drag and friction and cuts down on fuel. So it saves money. It could also help to heal the planet. * Compared with planes and trucks, ships are the greenest form of mass transport. Shipping contributes 11 grams of CO2 per ton per mile, a tenth of what trucks produce. Air freight flies way ahead, emitting 1193 grams per ton-mile. Sending a container from Shanghai to Le Havre emits fewer greenhouse gases than the truck that takes the container to Lyon. The Natural Resources Defence Council calculated the emissions involved in the journey of a typical T-shirt from a Chinese factory to an American back.

The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us
by Robert H. Frank, Philip J. Cook
Published 2 May 2011

The turnpikes and canals of the eighteenth century, the great railroads of the nine­ teenth century, and modern trucking along the vast highway networks of the twentieth century have each, in turn, made it possible for the best producers to extend their offerings to ever broader domestic markets. More recently, technological advances in ocean shipping, the grow­ ing importance of air freight, and the steady decline of tariff barriers have extended this phenomenon across international borders. With the exception of the period between World Wars I and II, internation­ ally traded goods have grown as a share of output in Western countries since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, more than doubling since 1 960 alone.2 To be a player in the tire market in northern Ohio it was once sufficient to be the best tire maker in that part of the state.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

All of these ideas, however, were not based on any evidence and were simply conjured out of thin air by theory. The Chicago School's view on cartels flies in the face of decades of evidence and billions of dollars of fines. According to The Economist, in the past few years, “international conspiracies have been busted in fields as diverse as seat belts, seafood, air freight, computer monitors, lifts and even candle wax.” Cartels that fix prices and reduce supply often persist for years. Furthermore, cartels don't necessarily break down because it is difficult to coordinate price fixing. In 2006, representatives of 20 or more airlines met in airports and restaurants to fix prices of international air-cargo services.

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal
by Duncan Mavin
Published 20 Jul 2022

Another aircraft investment also raised some red flags. This time, Greensill had set up a special purpose entity, in Ireland, called ‘Panamera Aviation Leasing XII DAC’. Panamera bought a Boeing cargo jet on behalf of a US-registered leasing group called Intrepid Aviation, which leased it on to a Russian air freight company that was part of the Volga Dnepr Group – an air transport operator with close ties to the government in Moscow. Haywood invested about $170 million in Panamera. Prytania noted that selling this investment would be difficult given its size and the nature of the group that was ultimately leasing the plane.

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
by Dan Ariely
Published 19 Feb 2007

The business blossomed, and shortly thereafter, the son, Salvador Assael, became known as the “pearl king.” The pearl king had moored his yacht at Saint-Tropez one day in 1973, when a dashing young Frenchman, Jean-Claude Brouillet, came aboard from an adjacent yacht. Brouillet had just sold his air-freight business and with the proceeds had purchased an atoll in French Polynesia—a blue-lagooned paradise for himself and his young Tahitian wife. Brouillet explained that its turquoise waters abounded with black-lipped oysters, Pinctada margaritifera. And from the black lips of those oysters came something of note: black pearls.

Redrobe
by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Published 1 Jan 2000

Drop a frag hag like Passion with her little flying camera into a war zone and three hours later a significant slice of the world were vid-mailing congress or parliament with demands that whatever Passion’s Passion was complaining about be stopped, immediately… Courtesy of CySat nV starving kids to death and blaming famine or refusing to let HelpFirst air freight them medicine and calling it sanctions had become vote losers. Samsara solved that problem. It also got the Dalai Lama out of Beijing’s hair and gave Indonesia, Texas and the Ukraine somewhere to ship those dissidents too high-profile to kill. It was small wonder the UN vote was near unanimous.

Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga
by Hunter S. Thompson
Published 1 Jan 1966

—Fontana detective Motorcycle outlaws have been accused of maintaining a dope network, a sinister web of sales and deliveries from one coast to the other. Federal narcotics agents say the Hell’s Angels shipped more than $1,000,000 worth of marijuana from southern California to New York City between 1962 and ’65, sending it by air freight in boxes labeled “motorcycle parts.” That is a lot of grass, even at street-corner retail prices. The “network” was exposed in late 1965, when, according to the Los Angeles Times, “eight persons who identified themselves as members [of the Hell’s Angels] pleaded guilty in a San Diego court to charges of smuggling 150 pounds of marijuana from Mexico into the United States at San Ysidro.”

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers
by Andy Greenberg
Published 5 Nov 2019

Fernández and countless other frantic Maersk customers faced a set of bleak options: They could try to get their precious cargo onto other ships at premium, last-minute rates, often traveling the equivalent of standby. Or, if their cargo was part of a tight supply chain, like components for a factory, Maersk’s outage could mean shelling out for exorbitant air freight delivery or risk stalling manufacturing processes, where a single day of downtime costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many of the containers, known as reefers, were electrified and full of perishable goods that required refrigeration. They’d have to be plugged in somewhere or their contents would rot.

A History of Modern Britain
by Andrew Marr
Published 2 Jul 2009

To show his anger and to find a new and secure source of revenue, he abruptly retaliated by seizing control of the Suez canal, triggering the coup with code-words given to a mass public rally. If the dam was not just a dam, the canal was not merely a canal. It was the ultimate liquid motorway, a vital artery of world trade, connecting Europe through the Mediterranean, with India, Australia, New Zealand and the Far East. In the days before mass air freight the only other way was round the Cape, infinitely further, slower and more expensive. Years before Eden had called it the jugular vein of the British Empire, and in the mid-fifties a quarter of all British exports and imports came through it. It wasn’t only Britain. Three-quarters of Europe’s oil came from the region, half of it through the canal.

…

Parts of the country far from London, such as the English south-west and Yorkshire, enjoyed a ripple of wealth that pushed their house prices to unheard-of levels. From Leith to Gateshead, Belfast to Cardiff Bay, once-derelict shorefront areas were transformed. Supermarkets, exercising huge market power, brought cheap meat and factory-made meals into almost everyone’s budgets. The new global air freight market, and refrigerated lorries moving freely across a Europe shorn of internal barriers, carried out-of-season fruit and vegetables, fish from the Pacific, exotic foods of all kinds, to superstores everywhere. Hardly anyone was out of reach of a Tesco, a Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s or Asda. By the mid-2000s, the four supermarket giants owned more than 1,500 superstores.

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response
by Tony Connelly
Published 4 Oct 2017

Inside, Maritha Gundersen will do the paperwork. Seventy per cent of the shipments she processes are fish, mostly salmon from the fish farms to the north, but also trout, lobster and king crab. The salmon is exported to the United States and Canada. Roadfeeders do plenty of road deliveries, as their name would suggest, but air freight is where the money is. Gundersen collects the key details: weight, value, content, what the mix is, and the identities of the consignee, the shipper and the agent. Once everything is accounted for, the documents are electronically submitted to customs. If customs are happy, the driver will receive an SMS en route to say that everything is in order.

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
by Gene Kim , Kevin Behr and George Spafford
Published 14 Jul 2013

Instead, it should be based on the tempo of how quickly the bottleneck resource can consume the work.” I just stare at him blankly. He continues, “Because of how Mark was releasing work, inventory kept piling up in front of our bottleneck, and jobs were never finished on time. Every day was an emergency. For years, we were awarded Best Customer of the Year from our air freight shipment company, because we were overnighting thousands of pounds of finished goods to angry customers almost every week.” He pauses and then says emphatically, “Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who created the Theory of Constraints, showed us how any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot
Published 2 Feb 2010

Within days they found that HeLa was, in fact, more susceptible to the virus than any cultured cells had ever been. When they realized this, they knew they’d found exactly what the NFIP was looking for. They also knew that, before mass-producing any cells, they’d need to find a new way to ship them. Gey’s air freight shipping system worked fine for sending a few cells to colleagues here and there, but it was too expensive for shipping on a massive scale. And growing cells by the billions wouldn’t help anyone if they couldn’t get those cells where they needed to go. So they began experimenting. On Memorial Day 1952, Gey gathered a handful of tubes containing HeLa cells and enough media for them to survive for a few days, and packed them into a tin lined with cork and filled with ice to prevent overheating.

Swindled: the dark history of food fraud, from poisoned candy to counterfeit coffee
by Bee Wilson
Published 15 Dec 2008

Now that the big food companies have got in on the organic act—wanting a slice of the more than twelve-billion-dollar market—they have pushed to dilute the standards, lobbying to include some synthetic chemicals under the permitted definition of organic. Rising demand for organic food in Britain means that more and more if it is air-freighted in from abroad, lengthening the chain between consumer and producer and giving the lie to the ideal of organic food as wholesome and environmentally sound. Given these “food miles,” many food campaigners now believe it is better to buy local food—even if not technically “organic”—than it is to buy “organic” vegetables from halfway across the world.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
by Jeffrey Sachs
Published 1 Jan 2008

In today’s Internet-empowered world, a major noncoastal city such as Bangalore, India, can export knowledge-based services to the world’s markets via the Internet without having to worry about access to shipping routes. In other words, changes in technology shift the particular advantages of geography (from coal to oil, for example) and also eliminate certain geographical barriers altogether (think of air freight or the Internet). When correctly understood, a geographical analysis helps to frame a country’s development strategy by identifying areas of priority public investment and by suggesting how a country’s underlying production costs are likely to shape the industrial structure. Geography will shape the balance between light and heavy industry, between industry and services, between types of agricultural crops, and between alternative locations for urbanization and trade.

The Future of Technology
by Tom Standage
Published 31 Aug 2005

Conversely, white-collar work continues to be produced in the same way that Ford produced the Model t: at home and in-house. Bruce 113 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY 4.1 2.1 Distance no object Transport costs Telecom costs Revenue per ton mile, cents* $’000 per year† for two Mbps fibre leased line, half circuit‡ 8 India Air freight 80 Rail Philippines 60 6 4 1,000 100 10 Barge 500 40 (inland waterways) 20 2 United States 0 0 1980 85 Source: McKinsey Global Institute 90 95 99 750 1996 97 98 250 Ireland 99 2000 0 01 *Revenue used as a proxy for prices; adjusted for inflation †January figures ‡International leased line for India; long-distance domestic leased line in the US Harreld, the head of strategy at ibm, reckons that the world’s companies between them spend about $19 trillion each year on sales, general and administrative expenses.

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution
by Charles R. Morris
Published 1 Jan 2012

The purpose of the offering was to finance a mechanized rail-and roller-based goods assembly and distribution system, not unlike those pioneered by Alexander Holley for the steel industry. By the turn of the century, virtually every consumer was within reach of a Sears or Montgomery, Ward catalog. Delivery times almost anywhere in the country were thirty days or less, which prevailed until air-freight deliveries became widespread three-quarters of a century later. In order of magnitude, the gains in distributional efficiency were probably greater than those from the Internet in our own day. And with consumers as the driving force behind growth, the American economy was roaring ahead at a rate faster than any country had ever sustained over so long a period.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits
by Richard Davies
Published 4 Sep 2019

The result of this is a simple economic problem that is one of the Congo’s unheard-of scandals. Across the world, ever bigger shipping tankers and fuel-efficient trucks – the modern workhorses of trade – have driven down the cost of transport year after year. But lacking both the ports and road network to accommodate them, the Congo instead relies on air freight, Mr Cuche explains. Low-value yet heavy imported products – everything from toothpaste and shampoo to fruit and vegetables – arrive in the country and are distributed around it by aeroplane, pushing up the prices. The result is that a city that has the lowest income and highest poverty in the world is also one of the most expensive places to live in Africa.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear
by Gregg Easterbrook
Published 20 Feb 2018

Bulk transportation of commodities, not evident in consumer markets but essential to production, keeps falling in price, which is good for standards of living while causing more change. In the nineteenth century, bulk-transport ships traveled from the East Coast of the United States to China in about three months; now it takes about three weeks, and twenty-four-hour continent-to-continent air freight is no longer used just for tiny items but also for heavy shipments. Faster ships and smaller crews have cut the cost of transoceanic shipment to as low as $10 a ton. Container ships larger than America’s nuclear-powered supercarriers have made transport affordable enough that cell-phone parts can be fabricated in a dozen places around the world, shipped to Asia for assembly, then shipped back for sale at ever-lower prices.

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
by Edward Tenner
Published 1 Sep 1997

It has always been cheaper to make textiles and clothing in Asia than in rural America, let alone in New York City. What protected American manufacturing as much as tariffs and quotas was the flow of information. Even with airmail, it might take too long to send designs and patterns overseas. Fax and electronic mail have changed that, taking weeks off turnaround times. With air freight an option for higher-priced merchandise, a major advantage of North American and European manufacturers—closeness to the end customer—has been seriously eroded. By buying time cheaply, new technology works against those who used to have time on their side. The introduction of the IBM PC as the standard for personal computers in 1981 (older rivals soon faded, though the Apple Macintosh made its debut as an alternative standard in 1984) launched a new era for office work and the service sector.

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters
by Oliver Franklin-Wallis
Published 21 Jun 2023

As modern agriculture and supply chains have made food cheap, diverse, and plentiful, it can also sometimes feel that we have forgotten to value the food we do eat, or understand the environmental or human costs that have gone into its production – from meat farming to out-of-season blueberries delivered by refrigerated air-freight fresh from Peru. Chris, Sue and the group have seen this change for themselves. ‘Even when we give them away, we’ve had clients who say, “Oh, the potatoes are quite muddy,”’ Sue says, irritably. ‘I say, “Yes, they came out of a field. You wash them.”’ There’s a murmur of agreement among the group.

The Windup Girl
by Paolo Bacigalupi
Published 15 Sep 2009

They speak of harvests in the north, and discuss the problem of the Mekong now that the Chinese have placed more dams at its source. They talk about new clipper ship designs that Mishimoto is preparing for production. "Forty knots with favorable winds!" Carlyle pounds the table gleefully. "A hydrofoil package and fifteen hundred tons of cargo. I'm going to buy a fleet of them!" Akkarat laughs. "I thought air freight was the future. Heavy-lift dirigibles." "With those clippers? I'm willing to hedge my bets. During the old Expansion there was a mix of transit options. Air and sea. I don't see why it won't be the same this time." "The new Expansion is on everyone's minds these days." Akkarat's smile fades. He glances at the Somdet Chaopraya, who gives a barely discernable nod.

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms
by Iain Overton
Published 15 Apr 2015

Huge stocks of Ukrainian weaponry were bought up and sold to groups like the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone and FARC forces in Colombia.11 Men like Minin became major brokers of arms to Charles Taylor in Liberia, a country under an arms embargo. Minin did things like send 9 million rounds of ammunition and 13,500 AKM rifles to the capital Monrovia in two air-freight deliveries, listing them as headed for Burkino Faso.12 Today, though, things have changed. Experts have confided in me, in a way where even things that were not secret were phrased as being such, that the age of the Merchants of Death has ended. Instead, they said, new realities have created a different type of smuggler – often even more explicitly sanctioned by governments.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

It converted an idle fleet of thirty Airbus and Boeing passenger jets to support the cold chain. A specialized storage facility was established in Addis Ababa and negotiations began to establish a WHO-approved production site in Egypt. Both China’s Sinovac and Russia’s Sputnik V were under consideration. Until production could begin in Africa, air freight would operate from Shenzhen Airport, where Alibaba was building China’s first international cold chain facility.61 In early March, Ethiopian Airlines made its first delivery, carrying 2.2 million doses provided by COVAX. * * * — By early 2021, as more and more good news came in from Phase III trials around the world, it was clear that it was possible to develop not just one vaccine or one family of vaccines in record quick time, but many.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

He had felt her presence in the small trailer where he continued to stay on occasion in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and now in Canada, memories of his stomach pains and fainting spells from the previous summer still plagued him. He kept telling himself that he had been tired of San Francisco and the rat race of work and social entanglements. His retreat was supposed to offer a respite for simple physical tasks and planning. “Relax, Stewart, enjoy paradise,” he reminded himself. That wasn’t as easy as he hoped. An air freight snafu resulted in much of his gear being lost—including his meditation pillow—and he used its absence to avoid the Zen practice. He had two female guests, but when each left, he simultaneously felt unsettled and pleased. Robert Frank was around, which was good, but Brand still felt uneasy, without serenity.

Construction Project Management
by S. Keoki Sears
Published 7 Feb 2015

The compression of an activity can be achieved in a variety of ways, depending on its nature. Additional crews, overtime, or multiple shifts can be used. It may be possible to subcontract it. More equipment may be brought in temporarily and assigned to that activity. Earlier material deliveries may be achieved by authorizing the fabricator to work overtime, by using air freight or special handling, or by sending one of the contractor’s own trucks to pick up and deliver the material. There usually are, of course, some activities whose durations cannot be reduced feasibly. 7.6 Project Direct Costs Before the discussion of project time reduction can proceed further, it is necessary to discuss the nature of project direct costs and indirect costs.

Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood
by Rose George
Published 22 Oct 2018

“We had an instance,” says Bethany, “where a Saudi doctor rang and said, look, this five-year-old boy is going to lose his foot, we really, really need them. It was frantic, it was just constant work between us speaking to the CITES authorities, and speaking to the airline trying to get all the air freight organized. We are two and something hours away from Heathrow. Our courier has gone away with everything and we had to speak to customs and say, can we get it done today rather than in two or three weeks. They actually held the Saudi Airlines flight for two hours for our courier to get up there.”

Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration
by Kent E. Calder
Published 28 Apr 2019

The NDRC aspires to see three corridors open systematically to connect China and Europe, as indicated in Map 4.5. Cargo flights between China and Europe have also been rapidly expanding. Helsinki and Chongqing are now extensively linked. So are Shanghai, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt. Large new transit air-cargo facilities like Navoi in Uzbekistan are also being erected to accommodate the increased air freight across the continent, mainly from Europe to China, Korea, and back.61 Interestingly, the UK and China responded to the Brexit vote by removing all limits on the number of cargo flights between the two countries, suggesting the future potential of Britain as a catalyst for transcontinental trade.62 Cargo traffic is rising across Eurasia, between China and Europe, in part due to the rising scale of transcontinental trade, including bulky items such as machinery and some electronics that travel easily by rail.

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century
by Tim Higgins
Published 2 Aug 2021

Their issue wasn’t simply cost but cash flow. The team debated their options. Musk wanted to shutter the Thai operation in favor of making battery packs in California. Tesla could then fly the cars from the UK to the San Francisco airport—something that plane regulations wouldn’t permit if batteries were pre-installed. The time saved by air-freighting would allow Tesla to turn them around more quickly and require less cash. He urged Straubel’s team to set up shop in Silicon Valley, making the all-important battery packs themselves. Marks, meanwhile, argued for relocating more work to Asia. He wanted to take advantage of low-cost labor. Straubel and his battery-packs sat at the center of a tug of war.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

In place of the simple inventory of seats sold and available as provided by the original Reservisor, there was now a constantly updated and instantly accessible passenger-name record containing information about the passenger, including telephone contacts, special meal requirements, and hotel and automobile reservations. The system quickly took over not just reservations but the airline’s total operation: flight planning, maintenance reporting, crew scheduling, fuel management, air freight, and most other aspects of its day-to-day operations. The system was fully operational in 1964, and by the following year it was stated to be amply recouping its investment through improved load factors and customer service. The project had taken ten years to implement. The development may have seemed leisurely from an external perspective, but an orderly, evolutionary approach was imperative when replacing the information system of such a massive business.

Game Over Press Start to Continue
by David Sheff and Andy Eddy
Published 1 Jan 1993

They agreed on two things: they were fed up with working for other people, and they wanted to make more money. They formed their first business in Seattle, a trucking company they called Chase Express. They managed a fleet transporting containers from Seattle’s piers when a friend of Judy’s called from Hawaii with a proposition. He said it was a sure thing. Judy found himself at the air-freight dock of the airport, claiming a giant crate. He tried, unsuccessfully, to get it into the back of his station wagon. He finally gave up and tied it on the roof. Judy unpacked the crate in his living room. Inside was something that looked like a cocktail table with a TV screen that faced upward, like a tabletop.

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell
by Phil Lapsley
Published 5 Feb 2013

Over the course of three days agents arrested fourteen people in eight cities, including Minneapolis, Dallas, Houston, and Memphis, charging them with manufacturing, selling, and using blue boxes. But here was the interesting thing: they weren’t phone phreaks, or even bookies or hippies. This time the people arrested were all upstanding members of society, including real estate agents, stock brokers, two executives with a vending company, and the president of an air freight firm. A subsequent news release from AT&T described it as follows: “Cheat Ma Bell! Rip-off the phone company! Beat the system! Popular phrases like these were quite fashionable not so very long ago. Just about everyone attributed them to well-known anti-establishment types, to the New Left, and to the self-styled phone phreaks.”

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley
Published 17 May 2010

Two economists recently concluded, after studying the issue, that the entire concept of food miles is ‘a profoundly flawed sustainability indicator’. Getting food from the farmer to the shop causes just 4 per cent of all its lifetime emissions. Ten times as much carbon is emitted in refrigerating British food as in air-freighting it from abroad, and fifty times as much is emitted by the customer travelling to the shops. A New Zealand lamb, shipped to England, requires one-quarter as much carbon to get on to a London plate as a Welsh lamb; a Dutch rose, grown in a heated greenhouse and sold in London, has six times the carbon footprint of a Kenyan rose grown under the sun using water recycled through a fish farm, using geothermal electricity and providing employment to Kenyan women.

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis
by Martin Wolf
Published 24 Nov 2015

Subsequently, China joined the WTO in 2001. This was a resurgence of global capitalism. The second source of the underlying transformation was technological. Changes in transportation technologies during this era were not dramatic, though developments and improvements in container ships and high-volume air freight were significant. Improvements in information and communications technology, notably the personal computer, the internet, mobile telephony and the mobile internet were of far greater significance. These revolutionary developments permitted the organization of production and distribution across the world on a more systematic and timely basis than ever before.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

They were also much more business-minded than their rivals: relying on their own resources rather than on the patronage of governments or plutocrats, they had to turn flying into a business as quickly as possible. In 1909, the brothers formed a company that, as well as manufacturing airplanes, ran a flight school, put on exhibitions of aeronautical daredevilry, and pioneered air freight. Turning a hobby into a business proved difficult. You couldn’t sell aircraft to regular consumers in the way that you could sell cars: they were too expensive and dangerous. Governments and business consortia were what mattered. You had to address all sorts of problems of supply and demand—hence the emphasis on flight schools and aerial displays.

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
by Michael Dobbs
Published 3 Sep 2008

There is just one catch: most of the finding aids remain "classified." I could detect little rhyme or reason to the numbering of the cans, making the research process roughly equivalent to finding needles in a haystack. I was permitted to request twenty cans of film at a time, which were then air-freighted overnight from Kansas to Washington. After reeling through more than a hundred cans of film, and tens of thousands of images, I feel enormously fortunate to have found some previously unpublished photographs of the Bejucal facility taken by U.S. reconnaissance planes in October 1962. Several frames included shots of the special vans used to transport nuclear warheads around Cuba, proof that I had found the right place.

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?
by Alan Weisman
Published 23 Sep 2013

An identical set is housed at the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation at Fort Collins, Colorado, and yet another goes to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in a cavern deep in the Norwegian permafrost: the so-called doomsday repository for the Earth’s botanical diversity, should seed banks elsewhere be lost to disaster or war, or their source varieties succumb to climate change. The purpose of this gene bank is to dole out genetic material, five grams at a time, to breeders developing new strains. But it is also a hedge against emergencies, such as when stem rust, a dreaded wheat fungus, broke out in Uganda in 1999, and CIMMYT air-freighted hundreds of kilos of resistant seed to East Africa. Over the coming years, CIMMYT intends to genetically classify its entire germplasm collection. Along with historic strains, it holds seeds that Norman Borlaug archived during all the steps that led to his Green Revolution varieties, believing that eventually biotechnology would allow them to see exactly what they did to improve wheat over the last few decades.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
by Greta Thunberg
Published 14 Feb 2023

To avoid the impact of manufacture, and to help take the status out of cars, keep your current car on the road, rather than buying a new one, unless it is very inefficient or your mileage is very high. If you do need to replace a car, buy a small, efficient one, electric or hydrogen-powered if possible. When buying food, the simple rules of thumb are to eat less meat and dairy (especially less beef and lamb); to make sure you eat everything you buy; and to avoid anything that may have been air-freighted, hothoused or overpackaged. If you work in marketing or advertising In today’s situation, it is not OK to make a living persuading people to think a certain way or to buy things regardless of whether it is in their best interests or in the interests of the planet. Ask yourself carefully whether that is the nature of your work.

The Gun
by C. J. Chivers
Published 12 Oct 2010

By one example, Romanian surplus was initially sold at $93 to $98 each for a fixed-stock rifle, or $115 for a rifle with a folding stock.69 These prices were roughly comparable to the price of an M-16 rifle—in 1966.70 The brokers then flipped the rifles at higher prices to the American companies awarded the Pentagon contracts, which in turn charged the Pentagon more—in the range of $150 to $165 a rifle, including air-freight delivery costs to Baghdad or Kabul. The rifles had typically been manufactured during the Warsaw Pact years and had sat unused in the decades since; they were considered new. Some vendors passed off used rifles to the Pentagon by reconditioning them with new finishes and lacquers. Newly manufactured rifles would cost significantly more, because of the increased costs of labor, energy, and commodities required to make them.

The Rough Guide to Florence & the Best of Tuscany
by Tim Jepson , Jonathan Buckley and Rough Guides
Published 2 Mar 2009

Tomatoes, olives, pasta, pulses, cheese, fruit and vegetables were the region’s staples. Today, affluence has brought a few changes – more meat in particular, notably the famous bifstecca all fiorentina (a vast, grilled T-bone steak) but for the most part tradition and a preference for simplicity prevail. Better still, in this age of air-freighted, year-round availability, most Tuscan food remains resolutely seasonal: fruits mature, appear for a few weeks in shops and on tables, and then disappear for another year. French gifts Traditional bottega selling artisanal foods  Not all Tuscan food has humble roots. Florentines, for example, claim they invented many of the classic dishes of French cuisine, pointing to the marriage in 1534 of Caterina de’ Medici to Henri of Valois, the future King Henri II.

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
by Jeremy Scahill
Published 1 Jan 2007

“Air America, an airline secretly owned by the CIA, was a vital component in the Agency’s operations in Laos,” according to a paper on the CIA Web site written by University of Georgia history professor William M. Leary. “By the summer of 1970, the airline had some two dozen twin-engine transports, another two dozen short-takeoff-and-landing (STOL) aircraft, and some 30 helicopters dedicated to operations in Laos. There were more than 300 pilots, copilots, flight mechanics, and air-freight specialists flying out of Laos and Thailand. . . . Air America crews transported tens of thousands of troops and refugees, flew emergency medevac missions and rescued downed airmen throughout Laos, inserted and extracted road-watch teams, flew nighttime airdrop missions over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, monitored sensors along infiltration routes, conducted a highly successful photoreconnaissance program, and engaged in numerous clandestine missions using night-vision glasses and state-of-the-art electronic equipment.

Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation
by Blake J. Harris
Published 12 May 2014

Sega went into Christmas 1991 by continuing to curve upward at a near exponential rate and, by now, had captured about 25 percent of the market. Stores were selling out of the Genesis with such frequency that it began to become a problem. It was great to feel like the popular, unattainable guy at the party, but not at the risk of suitors settling for a more available, second-rate friend. At first Sega managed the problem by air-freighting in systems from Japan—a costly proposition, but worth the additional overhead to avoid losing customers. But, like a Band-Aid that’s lost its sticking power, this was no longer a viable option as the holidays approached and demand skyrocketed. To maintain the momentum, Nilsen spearheaded a marketing program intended to prevent parents from settling for Nintendo at any cost.

The Simple Living Guide
by Janet Luhrs
Published 1 Apr 2014

The only hitch is that you need to take everything with you on a carry-on bag rather than checking it in. This was also no problem for me since I travel light anyway. Here is how air couriers work. The big air courier companies, such as DHL Worldwide, ship this way when they want their packages delivered in a timely manner. When packages are shipped regular air freight (without a passenger), the packages may sit for hours or days on an airline’s freight loading dock before being sent to their final destination. Packages checked with a passenger (you) will arrive on the same flight. This is all perfectly legal. Since they ship so much stuff, they need lots of people simply to sit in the seats they have already paid for.

Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
Published 23 Oct 2011

McCollum later said, “He was usually off in a corner doing something on his own and really didn’t want to have much of anything to do with either me or the rest of the class.” He never trusted Jobs with a key to the stockroom. One day Jobs needed a part that was not available, so he made a collect call to the manufacturer, Burroughs in Detroit, and said he was designing a new product and wanted to test out the part. It arrived by air freight a few days later. When McCollum asked how he had gotten it, Jobs described—with defiant pride—the collect call and the tale he had told. “I was furious,” McCollum said. “That was not the way I wanted my students to behave.” Jobs’s response was, “I don’t have the money for the phone call. They’ve got plenty of money.”

Basic Economics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 1 Jan 2000

That, however, is not the case when there is one nationwide monopoly of a particular product under government control, as was the situation in the Soviet Union. In China’s economy as well, when it was government-planned for decades after the Communists took over in 1949, many enterprises supplied their own transportation for the goods they produced, unlike most companies in the United States that pay trucking firms or rail or air freight carriers to transport their products. As the Far Eastern Economic Review put it: “Through decades of state-planned development, nearly all big Chinese firms transported their own goods, however inefficiently.”{225} Although theoretically firms specializing in transportation might operate more efficiently, the absence of financial incentives for a government monopoly enterprise to satisfy their customers made specialized transport enterprises too unreliable, both as to times of delivery and as to the care—or lack of care—when handling goods in transit.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
by Vaclav Smil
Published 23 Sep 2019

Modis (1992) used logistic curves to forecast trajectories of many modern techniques (ranging from the share of cars with catalytic converters to the performance of jet engines) and assorted economic and social phenomena (ranging from the growth of oil and gas pipelines to passenger air traffic). One of the agreements between data and curve that he singled out was the growth of world air traffic: he predicted that by the late 1990s it will reach 90% of the estimated ceiling. In reality, by 2017 air freight was 80% higher than in the year 2000, and the number of passengers carried annually had more than doubled (World Bank 2018). In addition, Modis presented a long table of predicted saturation levels taken from Grübler (1990). Less than 30 years later some of these forecasts have become spectacularly wrong.

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Published 14 Apr 2001

Not quite. On Saturday, August 30, Crocker learned to his horror that the IMP was already sitting on the loading dock. Against all odds, it developed, the BBN crew had gotten their problems fixed ahead of time and had immediately trundled the first IMP onto an airplane for shipment out to California via air freight. And they had sent along Ben Barker, the junior hardware guy, to ride shotgun. Together with Truett Thach, a technician at BBN's Los Angeles office, he was waiting now to get the IMP set up. "Panic time at UCLA," Crocker noted. Kleinrock was in a sweat, too. Everybody gathered in the computer room to watch the hookup, he remembers: "My staff, the computer-science chairman, the School of Engineering administration, somebody from the chancellor's of- fice, somebody from AT&T long lines, local telephone-company people, Hon- eywell, the ARPA guys, the BBN guys-and everybody was ready to point the accusing finger!"

The Irrational Bundle
by Dan Ariely
Published 3 Apr 2013

The business blossomed, and shortly thereafter, the son, Salvador Assael, became known as the “pearl king.” The pearl king had moored his yacht at Saint-Tropez one day in 1973, when a dashing young Frenchman, Jean-Claude Brouillet, came aboard from an adjacent yacht. Brouillet had just sold his air-freight business and with the proceeds had purchased an atoll in French Polynesia—a blue-lagooned paradise for himself and his young Tahitian wife. Brouillet explained that its turquoise waters abounded with black-lipped oysters, Pinctada margaritifera. And from the black lips of those oysters came something of note: black pearls.

Lonely Planet Morocco (Travel Guide)
by Lonely Planet , Paul Clammer and Paula Hardy
Published 1 Jul 2014

Sending Parcels » The parcel office, indicated by the sign ‘colis postaux’, is generally in a separate part of the post-office building. » A 1kg package costs around Dh140 to send via airmail to the UK, Dh140 to the USA and Dh240 to Australia. » Parcels should not be wider, longer or higher than 2m; weight limit varies according to the destination, but it’s typically 30kg. » To ship goods home, buy a box and a shipping form at the post office and take them to the shop where you purchased your wares. » The shopkeeper knows the product and can wrap and pack the pieces well with newspaper and cardboard. » If you’ve purchased carpets, the vendor should have rolled and bound them in plastic sacks; if not, return and ask them to do so. » Label the outside of the package in several places with a waterproof pen. » Be very clear about the destination country; marking it in French as well as English helps. » Indicate the value of the contents if you like, but you may be charged taxes at the receiving end. » Don’t seal the box! Customs officers at the post office need to view the contents. » Your packages will be weighed and you will be charged Par Avion (air) freight rates unless you specify that you prefer the items shipped by land. » The overland service is considerably less expensive but can take three months. » Valuable speciality items such as large furniture may involve customs clearance. » Shopkeepers should be able to arrange clearance and shipping for you, but make sure you keep copies of all documentation in case the goods never arrive.

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield
by Jeremy Scahill
Published 22 Apr 2013

As for the attempted bombings in October, AQAP’s “Head of Foreign Operations” wrote in Inspire that bringing down the planes would have been a bonus but that the “objective was not to cause maximum casualties but to cause maximum losses to the American economy. That is also the reason why we singled out the two U.S. air freight companies: FedEx and UPS for our dual operation.” Noting that the US and other governments would likely spend substantial amounts of money reviewing and changing airport screening procedures, he wrote, “You either spend billions of dollars to inspect each and every package in the world or you do nothing and we keep trying again.”

Rainbow Six
by Tom Clancy
Published 2 Jan 1998

That would be a worthy use of his abilities, he thought, as he made another upward adjustment in F4's morphine drip just enough to yes, make her stuporous. He could show her the mercy he would have liked to have shown rhesus monkeys. Would they do animal experimentation in Kansas? There would be practical difficulties. Getting the animals to the labs would be very difficult in the absence of international air-freight service, and then there was the aesthetic issue. Many of the project members would not approve, and they had a point. But, damn it, it was hard to develop drugs and treatment modalities without some animal testing. Yes, Killgore thought, leaving one treatment room for another, it was tough on the conscience, but scientific progress had a price, and they were saving literally millions Of animals, weren't they?

Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies
by Tim Koller , McKinsey , Company Inc. , Marc Goedhart , David Wessels , Barbara Schwimmer and Franziska Manoury
Published 16 Aug 2015

A common approach to identifying peers is to use the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes or the newer Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) system developed by Standard & Poor’s and Morgan Stanley.11 11 Beginning in 1997, SIC codes were replaced by a major revision called the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The NAICS six-digit code not only provides for newer industries but 366 USING MULTIPLES These may be a good starting point, but they are usually too broad for a good valuation analysis. For example, UPS is included in the air freight and logistics GICS code, which includes 64 companies, most of which do not compete with UPS in its core business of delivering small parcels. Another approach is to use peers provided by the company being valued. However, companies often provide aspirational peers rather than companies that truly compete head-tohead.

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris
by Richard Kluger
Published 1 Jan 1996

It shredded fencing with its horns, lured a cloud of flies with its stench, and, all in all, created an unmanageable uproar. “You son of a bitch!” Shropshire snarled on the telephone the next day to the departed Murphy, who, though innocent of the ruse, soon found the company’s spotless headquarters in Lausanne the beneficiary of a very messy caged pig, air-freighted via Lagos and generating instantaneous chaos until the Great Philip Morris Animal War was called to a halt. For years the Nigerian operation made no money but at least kept the Philip Morris flag aloft long enough to establish familiarity with its brands. Not until a generation later, after the company withdrew from controlling ownership, selling off to local proprietors and retaining about 25 percent of the equity, did it begin to realize a small return on its investment.

Reamde
by Neal Stephenson
Published 19 Sep 2011

Zula herself had to make a modest effort to hide her own astonishment, for if ever there was a man cut out for a long trek down the length of a mountain range in hostile territory, it was Jahandar. To the point where Zula had some difficulty in imagining how they had smuggled him this deep into a Western democracy. They must have drugged him, packed him into a crate, shipped him over by air freight direct from Tora Bora, and kept him pent up on a mountaintop until now. Everything about his appearance—the hat, the beard, the glare, the battle scars—should have got him arrested on sight in any municipality west of the Caspian Sea. Anyway, never mind how they’d managed it, Jahandar was here, and he was pissed.

Ireland (Lonely Planet, 9th Edition)
by Fionn Davenport
Published 15 Jan 2010

John Cleere ( 056-776 2573; 22 Parliament St) One of Kilkenny’s finest venues for live music, this long bar has blues, jazz and rock, as well as trad music sessions. Grapevine ( 056-772 956; 6 Rose Inn St) If yet another pint in an atmospheric pub is just one too many, take refuge at this smart new tapas and wine bar. There’s also a stellar range of craft beers and, joy of joys, Moretti coffee, air-freighted from Italy, and quite possibly the best coffee you’ll ever taste. O’Riada (27 Parliament St) The lowest-key bar in Kilkenny gets pretty lively when there’s a hurling match screening. But most of the time you can ponder your pint and strike up a conversation with anyone – including yourself. * * * LOCAL BREW?