Did anyone else read this article and feel like it is a lot of words to say very little? I feel like the core of the article can be summarized into this:
Air transport is still more expensive than shipping. But the magnitude is less than it used to be. This is because shipping is seeing bottlenecks and surcharges to handle the bottlenecks. Therefore it makes the more expensive air transport ok to use especially with time sensitive holiday purchases coming up.
If that sounds right, almost all that comes from the last few sentences in the article.
But if authors would do that, people will spend far less time reading the articles and result in far less money for the news outlet.
I've started reading long articles on diagonal unless the article is very interesting or technical. I visually scan fast and try to extract the bits of information.
Maybe it would useful to submit articles to something like GPT-3 and get a meaningful summary in return.
Now they have an attention-grabbing or contentious headline and first paragraphs, then right at the bottom of the article include the crucial information that means it's actually not a big deal or particularly unusual.
Inverted pyramid, I think I remember it being called when I was in school. I even remember some newspaper articles that clearly followed the principle. They are very rare now.
Our daily college paper had an Associated Press machine for stories we couldn’t send reporters to. You could cut those stories after the first paragraph or two and it would make sense. We called it “AP style guide” articles..
There already are quite a few news article summarizers out there, usually quite good at extracting the gist of an article. It can have the occasional error, but then so can the source material so it's all good.
It's also an unnatural situation since if externalities of transportation were priced in (see left part of figure 8.6 on page 610 in https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...), there's no way in hell that air freight could be cheaper than maritime freight.
If by "trip" you mean passengers, then that's not what I'm talking about. Of course taking care of a passenger for many days as opposed to a few hours would be expensive (large-ish cabin with a bed, food, service crew, recreational facilities etc.). The same passenger survives the flight just in a seat. On the other hand, it's all same to cargo.
All true. And I probably deserve the downvote above. But it’s worth considering factors in favor of airfreight (beyond the increased value of getting your cargo sooner).
Cargo ships and aircraft both require crew, so my above comment applies to that portion of the cost. (Mitigated by the fact that crew per tonne of cargo is typically much smaller on a cargo ship than an aircraft.) Crew also have to be paid.
For a given container, the number of times it can be reused per 10 year lifetime is proportional to the speed of the mode of transport. Airplanes are 20 times faster than cargo ships, so the container can be reused 20 times as many times in a given time period. That means it can be optimized to be lighter, etc. A similar argument applies to the rest of the vehicle. And airplane can make a lot more round trips in its lifetime than a cargo ship. (This is of course mitigated by the fact a ship is usually a LOT cheaper to build per unit dry mass.)
Air travel also can be much closer to destination than cargo ship can. This is mitigated by how efficient intermodal transport is, but some countries don’t even have international container ports and most states don’t. Every city has an airport and usually many of them. This makes it harder for local labor issues to cause massive logistical headaches.
It’s also not that uncommon to lose cargo containers overboard during actual transit in sea, which effectively never happens for air freight (as they use extremely safe airliners with cargo inside the contained fuselage).
Anyway, if we could somehow improve the efficiency of air travel by an order of magnitude and reduce the cost of airframe manufacture, it’s not unreasonable to imagine there may be a way for airfreight to become pretty competitive with sea freight even for cargo that isn’t particularly time sensitive.
That and the graph on ratio of air transport prices to shipping prices were probably the key facts of the article that brought it all together. Dealing with 10x normal pricing is something I can't fathom in such large logistics businesses.
A lot of air cargo travels in the hold on passenger flights. Fewer passenger flights (as we've had for the last ~20 months) actually means less cargo capacity.
But isn't that just the pendulum swinging the other way so that it eventually settles back in the middle? Are these numbers expected to be the new norm?
Air transport is still more expensive than shipping. But the magnitude is less than it used to be. This is because shipping is seeing bottlenecks and surcharges to handle the bottlenecks. Therefore it makes the more expensive air transport ok to use especially with time sensitive holiday purchases coming up.
If that sounds right, almost all that comes from the last few sentences in the article.