Air Freight Desk

Four steps, in the order the work actually happens. Nothing here is new: each step runs the same engine as the tool it belongs to, cites the same source, and links to that tool’s own page when you need to go deeper. No booking, no tracking, no rates — this is reference and arithmetic.

A shared identifier never gets answered as one carrier

This is the rule that shapes step 1, and it is worth seeing worked. An air waybill prefix is a property of a record in the airline reference set, not a property of a carrier — and several records can hold the same one. A group carrier and the regionals that fly in its colours may share a prefix. A passenger airline and its cargo arm usually share a designator. A carrier that ceased operating keeps its record, and can sit ahead of a live carrier in raw data order for no reason other than where it landed in the file.

Prefix 081 is the example. Asked as a question — “whose prefix is this?” — it has no single answer, so the cited sentence names every holder, verified records first and historical records last:

AWB prefix 081 is held by 4 records — Qantas, Eastern Australia Airlines, QantasLink, Sunstate Airlines — the prefix alone does not identify one carrier.

That is the exact string the API puts in its citation field and the exact string this desk shows you, because both are built from the same function. When a prefix has one holder the sentence is the plain one — carrier name, prefix, full stop. The identifier validator applies the same rule from the other side: on a shared prefix it withholds the single airline and hands back the candidates instead of promoting one of them. See the 081 reference page →

How the four numbers on a waybill fit together

An eleven-digit air waybill number is two parts. The first three digits are the issuing carrier’s prefix, allocated by IATA. The next eight are the serial, and the last of those eight is a check digit: it is not decoration, it must equal the first seven digits of the serial modulo seven. That is the whole algorithm, and it is why a transposed pair of digits in the serial usually shows up immediately — the remainder moves and the last digit stops agreeing. What the check digit cannot tell you is whether the number was ever issued, whether a booking exists behind it, or where the shipment is. It is a structural test on eleven digits, nothing more, and any tool that implies otherwise is overselling it.

Airport codes are two registers, not one. The three-letter IATA code is the commercial one — it is what appears on the waybill, the label and the manifest. The four-character ICAO ident is the operational one, used by air traffic control and in flight planning, and it is the identifier that always exists: plenty of airfields have an ICAO ident and no IATA code at all. When the shipper gives you a postcode rather than an airport, working from coordinates to the nearest airports is usually faster than guessing, and it will surface the freighter-capable field a few miles further out that the obvious answer misses.

The unit load device decides what shape the cargo has to be before any of this matters. Every published figure on a ULD carries a basis, and the basis is the part people skip. A maximum gross weight can be a structural rating from the manufacturer or an operational limit published by one carrier for one aircraft type, and the same physical pallet can carry two very different numbers for exactly that reason. A pallet has no internal dimensions at all, because it has no walls; a build-up height is a property of the aircraft contour, not of the pallet. Read the qualifier that travels with the number, and confirm anything operationally critical against the operator.

Chargeable weight is the last step because it depends on the first three. Air freight is rated on whichever is greater, the actual gross weight or the volumetric weight, and the volumetric weight is the volume in cubic centimetres divided by a divisor the carrier applies. Six thousand is the long-standing convention. Express operators commonly apply five thousand, which makes the same box heavier on paper. The divisor belongs to your contract, so it is an input here rather than a constant, and the desk shows which basis governs and by how much rather than just handing you a figure.

What this page will not do

It will not book, quote, rate or track anything, and it will not tell you whether a shipment is acceptable to a carrier. It does not read your documents. It will not answer a dangerous-goods question for air: the dry ice entry above is the road entry from ADR 2025, labelled as such, with a pointer to the regime that actually governs air. Where a reference answer is genuinely ambiguous — a prefix held by several carriers, a UN number with more than one Table A row — the honest output is every candidate, not the first one, and that is what you will get.

Questions

Working from an agent instead

Every step here is a REST endpoint and an MCP tool, and one identifier can be resolved across all of them at once — a prefix, an airline designator, an airport code, a ULD type or a UN number all go into the same resolver and come back typed, ranked and cited. Read the API docs →