RISK
REDUCTION
STRATEGIES
Digital destiny
Dangerous goods are one of the airfreight industry’s bigger headaches, declares
Chris Lewis, but he notes that new electronic systems are starting to ease the pain.
It’s a given that nothing
can be allowed on an
aircraft that endangers its
safety. However, the rules
surrounding the transport of
such goods are complex and
often quite opaque.
One of the conditions
for membership of the
International Air Transport
Association by freight
forwarders, large or small, is
that a stipulated minimum
number of staff must
successfully complete the
association’s official training
course for dangerous goods
and that the knowledge must
also be regularly refreshed.
However, informational
technology is starting to
ease the burden and efforts
are being made to simplify
the process of checking DGs
before they are loaded on to
an aircraft.
Thus information
technology is slowly starting
to ease the burden. Back in
September 2018 Lufthansa
Cargo became the first carrier
to ship goods under an
electronic Dangerous Goods
Declaration (eDGD), from
Frankfurt airport to Mexico
City. It was the first airline
to support the new eDGD
standard, adopted in a pilot
phase for the new INFr8
electronic document portal
created by the Germany-based
software developer, Dakosy.
Frankfurt airport and global
freight forwarder Panalpina
also played a key part in the
development of the eDGD
standard, in collaboration with
the International Air Transport
Association under its e-freight
programme.
A team effort
The new eDGD standard was
very much a team effort. Jan-
Wilhelm Breithaupt, Lufthansa
Cargo’s Vice President Global
Handling Management,
explains that the whole process
started with airfreight shippers,
since it was they who ‘owned’
the DG data and initially input
it into the system.
Not only would the new
standard markedly improve
the speed of the processing
of dangerous goods through
Customs, it would also make
the procedure of flying
dangerous goods safer,
Breithaupt predicted.
He added: “A purely digital
data transmission always
an industry working group
of over 20 airlines, freight
forwarders, ground handlers
and express integrators,
including Air France KLM
Cargo, Swissport, Panalpina
and DHL Express.
One of the biggest
headaches with dangerous
goods is that existing paper
manuals are voluminous,
cumbersome and require
considerable expertise to
interpret correctly.
The paper version of the
DGR is actually 1,100 pages
long and manually checking
that each shipper’s declaration
is compliant and that packages
are correctly marked, labelled
and packaged is both complex
and time consuming, says
IATA.
But, in February 2019, Air
France KLM Cargo said that
it had become the first airline
group to adopt IATA’s newly
developed Dangerous Goods
AutoCheck for shipment
acceptance. It automatically
checks the Shipper’s
Declaration for Dangerous
Goods against all relevant rules
and regulations in the IATA
Dangerous Goods Regulations,
using OCR technology to
offers improvement potential
for all stakeholders of the
supply chain. When data is
in the lead, the data quality is
raised with early automated
and manual checks, before
the physical freight arrives.
Better data quality and the
elimination of re-typing will
avoid errors, and thus the
operations will be based on
more accurate and better
data.”
Now, IATA has taken
the electronic dangerous
goods information a stage
further, having launched an
outline Dangerous Goods
AutoCheck solution in
2018. This was designed to
ensure that the shipper’s
Declaration for Dangerous
Goods (DGD) complies with
the IATA Dangerous Goods
regulations and allows
electronic consignment
data to be received directly.
Optical Character Recognition
technology turns paper-based
dangerous goods declarations
into electronic data and
sends handlers and carriers a
pictorial representation of the
package, including markings
and labelling.
IATA was supported by
16 June 2019 www.airlogisticsinternational.com
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