What is involved in working with an Indirect Air Carrier vs a company who is not TSA regulated? What are the advantages of working with an Indirect Air Carrier?

An Indirect Air Carrier is a designation granted by TSA to entities that have successfully passed rigorous training and testing and are able to work directly with airlines to tender freight.

The biggest advantage to being an Indirect Air Carrier is that we can utilize the extensive passenger aircraft network to move freight.

Being an Indirect Air Carrier is no easy task. A customer must be known in the TSA’s Known Shipper Management System before we can ship their items via passenger aircraft. And every pickup and delivery agent and their drivers must be accounted for and checked against a TSA database prior to the tendering of any freight to passenger aircraft. This is just part of the extensive security measures taken prior to moving freight this way.

 

What was one of the most interesting jobs, or projects, you’ve done for our local hospitals? Tell us about it!

We receive and store a lot of equipment for some of our local hospitals. One of the more rewarding requests we had was for our warehouse team to travel to one of the hospitals and install non-medical equipment in new OR rooms. Our team was able to help the construction and medical device teams get the OR rooms ready more quickly by stepping in and handling part of the installation.

The most satisfying job we do is moving stem cells all over the country for one hospital!

 

What was the most difficult jobs, or projects, you’ve done for a client in our warehouse? Tell us about it!

A few years back, a client was constructing a 12-story building in downtown Washington, DC. The construction was very much behind schedule and material was about to start arriving, but the client had no storage capabilities downtown. We were asked to store the windows that would eventually be installed and to expect one or two ocean containers a week of windows to arrive at our warehouse.

Before we knew it, we had two containers per day for three weeks straight of 12-foot long windows that were roughly palletized. At this point, there was no delivery date to the jobsite in sight. The warehouse was so stuffed with window pallets that you could hardly walk between them.

Fast forward six months later, they are finally ready for the windows. The difficult part was that they needed certain windows on certain days, and they could be buried anywhere in the slew of pallets. When it was time to ship the windows to downtown DC, we had to load the 12-foot pallet side by side on flatbed trucks. We only had inches to spare for the forklift on either side of the pallets.

 

About Mark! Mark is our Sales Operations Manager by title, but his work goes much deeper than that! Mark has been with US Express for 12 years and there’s nothing he isn’t involved in.