An aircraft on the ground and a stopped production line have the same shape. A large fixed cost is running while nothing is being produced, and the transport of a small object is the only thing standing between the two states. When the hourly cost of the stoppage is an order of magnitude larger than the transport, the correct decision is the fastest reliable method, and arguing about the freight rate is a way of losing money slowly.
Air freight · AOG and line down
AOG and line down freight
The one case where the cost of the delay is so much larger than the cost of the transport that the freight rate stops being a decision, and what that changes.
- Hand carry ceiling
- 32 kg
- Decided by
- The real deadline
- Screened before booking
- Always
- Stoppage cost figures held
- None
What this desk is. OnBoard Courier places on board couriers: a vetted person carries the consignment in the cabin on a scheduled passenger flight and hands it over against a signature. The desk does not operate air freight, does not hold an airline contract and is not a forwarder. Air freight enquiries sent through this site are passed to a vetted forwarding partner, and the pages here are written so that you can tell which of the two you actually need.
The economics, stated plainly
This site does not publish figures for what an hour of AOG or an hour of line stoppage costs. Those numbers are specific to the operator and the plant, they vary by an order of magnitude between cases, and quoting an industry average would be borrowing authority we do not have. The person raising the enquiry usually knows their own number, and it is the only one that matters.
What actually gets moved
On the aviation side: line replaceable units, avionics boxes, actuators, valves, wheels and brakes, seals, and the tooling needed to fit them. Many are small and dense, which is the profile that suits a cabin and suits air freight badly on a cost per kilo basis.
On the production side: injection moulds and mould inserts, control boards, sensors, robot end effectors, bearings, and semiconductor parts such as reticles, optics and chamber components. This site holds public industrial geography for the airports it covers, and the aerospace, automotive and semiconductor sites in that file are why these lanes exist at all. They are named on the corridor pages as geography, not as anybody's customer list.
Weight is what decides the method more often than urgency does. Under 32 kg a courier is possible. An engine, a landing gear assembly or a die is air freight or a charter, and no amount of urgency changes the physics.
What the first hour looks like
Establish the real deadline
Not the comfortable one. The hour the aircraft is scheduled out, or the hour the shift starts, decides which departures are candidates and therefore everything else.
Work backwards from departures, not forwards from collection
The list of departures that can still be reached is short and fixed. Whether the part can get to the airport in time is the question that is actually open, and it is answered against that list rather than in the abstract.
Screen the commodity before booking anything
Whether it may lawfully be carried, whether it is dangerous goods, whether it is export controlled, and whether the receiving country will admit it without a permit nobody holds. Skipping this is how a movement gets to an airport and stops.
Prepare the arrival while the shipment is still on the ground
The consignee is the importer of record and their broker files the entry. Naming that broker and getting the commercial invoice right at collection is what turns a customs step from an afternoon into an hour. See customs and Incoterms.
The honest split
For an AOG or a line down movement under 32 kg, on a lane with a passenger service in the window, a hand carry is usually the right answer and this desk places it. The site publishes a real timed example of one on how a booking runs, including a Dubai to Riyadh aircraft part that went door to door in eight hours and forty minutes.
For anything heavier, anything on a cargo aircraft only routing, and anything where no passenger flight fits the window, the answer is air freight or a charter, and the enquiry belongs with a forwarder. Send it through the form on this site and it is passed to a vetted forwarding partner, tagged as air freight, and not worked as a courier booking.
Questions people actually ask
01What does AOG actually mean?
Aircraft on ground: an aircraft that cannot fly until a part arrives. It is a commercial emergency rather than a safety one, and it is the case where the cost of the delay is so much larger than the cost of the transport that the freight bill stops being a decision.
02Is line down the same thing?
The same economics with a different asset. A production line that has stopped is burning fixed cost per hour, and in automotive and semiconductor plants the hourly number is large enough that the transport method is chosen on hours rather than on price.
03Why is a hand carry so common on these?
Because the parts are usually small and dense, the deadline is usually inside a day, and the failure mode of a cargo network on a bad day is exactly the failure you cannot afford. It is not that air freight is slow. It is that a hand carry loses less when something goes wrong, and on an AOG the whole point is what happens when something goes wrong.
04When is air freight still right on an AOG?
When the part is too heavy or too large for a cabin, when it is dangerous goods that cannot travel on a passenger aircraft, when the routing has no passenger service in the window, or when a charter is the answer because the part is an engine. All four happen, and a desk that never says so is selling rather than advising.
05What slows an AOG movement down in practice?
Almost never the flying. It is the export paperwork on a part that was pulled from a store in a hurry, an export control question on a dual use item, a customs entry at the far end that nobody prepared because the shipment was arranged in ninety minutes, and a receiving station that is closed. All four are worked in parallel with the booking or they are worked too late.
Where this came from
- Scheduled network, airlines and frequencies: AeroDataBox scheduled route statistics as held by this site, retrieved 2026-09-07. It is a snapshot rather than a live timetable, it includes some all cargo operators but is not a complete freighter schedule, and a carrier that is not listed may still fly the pair.
- Distances: Great circle, computed from published airport coordinates. They are shorter than a flown track and are not routing distances.
- Block times: Modelled, not measured: great circle distance times a track factor of 1.06, divided by a cruise speed of 720, 830 or 880 km/h by distance band, plus thirty minutes of taxi across the two ends. This is the same model the route calculator on this site uses. A real timetable will differ.
- Industrial sites: Public company information, checked 2026-09-07. Nothing here states or implies that any company named is a customer of OnBoard Courier or of any operator.
- Air cargo rules and definitions: The ICAO Technical Instructions and the IATA Dangerous Goods Regulations for dangerous goods, IATA Resolution 600a for the air waybill, the Montreal Convention 1999 for carrier liability, and Incoterms 2020. Where this site holds no figure of its own it says so rather than inventing one.
Who publishes this. OnBoard Courier is a hand carry placement desk in Dubai. It does not fly air freight. These pages exist because the desk is asked to rescue air freight that has run out of time often enough to have learned where the line between the two sits, and because a comparison written by somebody who sells only one of the two options is not a comparison. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it.
Air freight, the comparison · Corridors · The Atlas · Route calculator