Last September, a manufacturer of the expensive brandy delivered 1,680 cases to American Airlines at Paris Charles de Gaule airport, to be shipped as airfreight from Paris, France to Los Angeles..
By the time the shipment made it to California, 423 cases of cognac were ‘missing’.
Thankfully, the seller of the cognac had insured the shipment but the insurance company is now suing American Airlines, claiming the carrier is responsible for covering the costs of the lost (or seemingly more likely, stolen) cognac under the Montreal Convention.
I used to work on airline cargo. Misplacing stuff is a fairly common occurrence just like it happens with UPS, Fedex or your bags. More often than not misplaced stuff is found but every now and then it is not. At the end of the day all that stuff is insured. The problem comes when you loose something that can't be easily replaced.
ReplyDeleteI will not name the carrier but I remember we lost an urn of cremated human remains. The family was not happy. You would be shocked to know how many dead bodies fly in the cargo holds of commercial airlines everyday.
Back when movies were shot and projected on film we would carry quite a bit of those movies. When movies where released to the theaters we would fly copies of the movies to theaters all over the world. It was quite frequent for one or more of these copies to get misplaced and sooner or later pirate copies of the "lost" movie would appear. Eventually the airline caught the people that happened to "lose" the movies.
A movie studio was shooting a movie in some country in Eastern Europe. They would shoot and send the raw footage back to LA for editing... We lost several days worth of filming... They had to reshoot everything we lost.
At one point we lost a GE engine for a 777. It was eventually found but you have to ask yourself how do you misplace something that big!
I could keep going for days...
I wish you, and others with inside astonishing information like you have, would write books, magazine articles, etc. It's eye opening to the rest of us to learn how the many layers of operations work in things, like in your example, airline cargo.
DeleteThanks! Any time you want to let fly with the stories of back in the day at Airline X! I'd love to share it!
Good read!
ReplyDelete