Air Charter Service demonstrated that it doesn’t always need to be a single charter aircraft, recently, when it arranged the movement of almost 65 tons of energy machinery from Shanghai to the United States. The operation was completed in just over one week and for less than the cost of a full charter flight.
The achievement came courtesy of ACS’s Time Critical division, which was tasked with transporting the heavy machinery from Shanghai to Nashville, Tennessee. Rather than defaulting to a single chartered aircraft, the team evaluated both charter and scheduled-service options and built a Next Flight Out (NFO) solution composed of 20 separate scheduled flights – a solution assembled the very same day the enquiry came in, with the first flight departing just two days after confirmation.
Robert Alleman, CEO of ACS Time Critical, explained how the route was optimized for both speed and cost: “The solution involved going into Chicago rather than Nashville, which wasn’t much further away than its final destination.” He noted that routing through Chicago meant more frequent flights and better-suited handling capabilities, which processed the cargo quicker and made the whole operation more cost-effective. Coordinating 20 scheduled departures and arrivals – many of them overnight – was no small feat. “We enlisted the help of our 24-hour operations team, along with ACS colleagues across the world in different time zones, and we had all hands on deck to get them all over the line,” Alleman said. The shipment arrived well in time of the customer’s deadline, which, Alleman emphasized, demonstrated ACS’s NFO expertise, and revealed: “Customers don’t necessarily come to us for a specific service, they come to us to move their cargo, knowing we have the options to find the optimum solution.”
