Shipping Dangerous Goods by Air: A Semiconductor Case Study
Shipping dangerous goods by air is a significant challenge by itself. Throw in pandemic-related flight restrictions and a strict, in-transit temperature requirement of –18°C and it created a serious situation that threatened to disrupt manufacturing operations for one of the world’s leading semiconductor parts manufacturers. Here’s how the company solved the problem.
Maintaining Factory Output Despite Disrupted Supply Lines
Pre-pandemic, this manufacturer was moving a critical raw material, classified as a dangerous good (DG), from Shanghai directly to one of its factories in Cebu – an island in the Philippines. But with pandemic-related flight restrictions, direct service was no longer possible. That meant switching to a multi-leg, multi-carrier solution for shipping dangerous goods by air.
Because the door-to-door lifespan of the cargo cooling agent, dry ice, is just 72 hours, the extended, multi-leg journey required re-packing the cargo with new dry ice during the journey. Some of the company’s freight forwarding partners failed to deliver the needed air freight capacity for DG and to maintain a –18° C temperature from origin to final delivery.
Dimerco, which had worked with this company on other shipping projects, was asked to assist.
Solution for Shipping Dangerous Goods by Air Freight
For this difficult route, Dimerco determined that a Shanghai-to-Hong Kong-to-Manila-to-Cebu routing would be the fastest, most reliable route given the severely scaled-back flight schedules. And, since flights from Hong Kong to Manila were less frequent, Dimerco’s Hong Kong office had to pull cargo from the HKG air freight terminal and hire a professional DG company to re-pack the dry ice at a nearby airport facility. The cargo was then moved back to a cold storage room to sustain the required temperature until the next leg of the journey.
The diagram below shows the steps in the routing process.
Dimerco is a global 3PL, integrating air and ocean freight, trade compliance and contract logistics services that connect Asia’s logistics and manufacturing hubs with each other, and with North America and Europe
