A movie that understands the actual condition of the distribution network of a major US transport company that enables long distance delivery in a short time

FedExYaDHL,UPSMajor shipping companies such as USA tend to be long distances from the extent of the national land even though considering only the domestic transportation. Despite this, we have built a logistics network that can receive packages shipped at 17 o'clock in Miami, Florida, at 8:30 am in Anchorage, Alaska, and it is also possible to ship luggage overseas. We publish a lot of world geography and economic related movies on YouTubeWendover ProductionsWhen you watch the movie on the channel, you can see the actual state of the logistics network of the major American transport company.

How Overnight Shipping Works - YouTube


The logistics system that keeps moving without taking a break is groundbreaking.


Luggage shipped from Miami, Florida at 17 o'clock Monday will arrive at Anchorage, Alaska at 8:30 on Tuesday morning ......



Scotland at 17 o'clock on TuesdayEdinburghYou can let the parcels shipped from you arrive in Anchorage, Alaska at 9 o'clock Wednesday morning.



For FedEx,Emirates Airlines,Etihad Airways,Qatar AirwaysIt owns more aircraft than the aircraft owned by the aircraft, and it also develops to various countries around the world including North Korea at DHL, and boasts the largest number of passengers in the world using the aircraft at UPSDelta Air LinesWe are carrying packages to more than twice the destination.


Each company has a global network that enables high-speed transport at comparatively low prices. It is the aviation of this network.


In particular, FedEx is the world's largest cargo carrier, with 650 flying aircraft operating for 400 destinations, with the majority of this aircraft being multipleHub AirportWe are operating from one of the airports.


The FedEx hub airport is located in Singapore, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Seoul, Osaka, Anchorage, Auckland, Dallas, Indianapolis, Greensboro, Miami, Newark, Toronto, Paris, Cologne, Milan, Dubai, Memphis I use it to transfer the unloaded baggage to another airplane. Especially big hub airport is Memphis of Tennessee State.


Memphis is a city with a population of 650,000, it is not a huge city there. It is in that location that FedEx develops business based on this city.


The position of Memphis is not the geographical center point of America like the image below ... ...


Population center of gravityFrom the point of view, the state of Missouri is the center of the United States, and the location of Memphis about 200 miles away therefrom will be the average place to deliver luggage to all residents in the United States is.


For similar reasons, the hub airport that is the base of UPS is close to Missouri, located in Louisville, Kentucky.


The size of the Commercial Terminal at Memphis Airport is a place surrounded by a yellow frame, but the terminal used by FedEx is a huge part in the purple part.


Louisville Airport is more extreme and you can see that the ocher colored UPS terminal is many times larger than the commercial one compared with the yellow terminal commercial terminal.


Next, let's see how hub airport in Memphis of FedEx works. Between 22 o'clock and 25 o'clock, luggage loaded on about 150 aircraft from all over the world will come.


Immediately after arrival of the airplane, the baggage is lowered and placed in automatic sorting system.


It will be loaded into the container for the next flight within 15 minutes.


After that, from 2 AM to 4 AM, we will fly for about 2 hours by plane to the next destination. In other words, if it is a domestic baggage, it arrives at the nearest airport by 6:00 am.


After arriving at the nearest airport from the hub airport, we will move with a small propeller machine to move quickly to a small town.


After that it will be delivered using trucks so that the package can be delivered to the destination as soon as possible via three means of transportation: airplane, small aircraft and truck.


So what happens when you send luggage from Phoenix, Arizona to Seattle, Washington? The straight distance between Phoenix and Seattle is approximately 1770 km.


However, when traveling through Memphis, it is necessary to move about 4800 km or more, and the flight time takes about 6 hours. Luggage will arrive in about one night, but we will waste more than 3000 km of fuel for transportation.


In this case, we will use a different hub airport. In this case we will use Auckland's hub airport to do a relatively efficient 2092 km flight. In this way, if it is more efficient to use another hub airport than Memphis, we will prioritize that route.


FedEx's most characteristic hub airport is located in Anchorage, Alaska. Anchorage less than 300,000 population has the fourth largest cargo airport in the world.


What is distinctive, this is also related to the location, if you draw a straight line considering the curvature of the earth from the hub airport in Memphis to the point in Osaka, you will pass the Anchorage on a straight line. This means that this airport is a stopover for flights from the USA to Asia.


Currently, dozens of freight carriers operate in Anchorage, but many airlines are using it to refuel airplanes and change passengers. However, in FedEx and UPS we are sorting baggage here ... ...


I am using Anchorage as a hub airport that serves as a base for luggage sent from Asia to the United States.


In Anchorage, after handling baggage sent from Asia through customs, it is loaded on an airplane towards the destination.


This streamlined process not only shortens shipping time but also leads to cost savings. In the transportation industry, the cost of the shipping cost is an element that determines the success or failure of the business, and it is very important for the shipping company to contract with the retailer who can obtain permanent profit. Since retailers are shipping millions of packages a day, the difference of 1 cents (about 1 yen) will be very large.


Memphis's hub airport sorts luggage on that day, but most of the packages we handle are mostly due to business contracts.


For example, the flight from Memphis to Oklahoma City departs at 4 o'clock in the morning and arrives at 5:20 in the morning. After that, the plane will do a flight to return to Memphis around 10:10 at night.



In other words, we are waiting at Oklahoma City for more than 17 hours, which means that we only flight about 2 hours a day.


Considering that private airline companies are flighting more than 12 hours a day, it is not worth paying for FedEx to purchase aircraft of several million dollars (about hundreds of millions of yen) for several hours a day to use .


For this reason, FedEx and other shipping companies have purchased and used cheap airplanes that are out of date as unavailable for airliners. Of course older aircraft tend to have higher fuel efficiency, but since it is spending most of the time waiting, it will not be a big problem.


FedEx, UPS, and DHL are striving for daily efforts to further improve the efficiency of the distribution network.