Freight Shipping at O’Hare International Airport

Frigid, biting winters. Sticky, sweltering summers. Even the occasional UFO sighting. This is shipping to Chicago. O’Hare International Airport keeps running smoothly through it all.

O’Hare has the advantage of being one of the only major airports between the highly populated East Coast and the more spread out Western half of the United States. It’s the third busiest passenger airport after Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta and Los Angeles International.

By cargo tonnage, it moves the sixth most freight in the nation, seated behind major airports in Memphis, Anchorage, Louisville, Los Angeles, and Miami. That’s good enough to place O’Hare as the 17th busiest cargo airport in the world.

How We Minimize Delays

O’Hare is a remarkable airport, and easily the best way of shipping to Chicago. Nonetheless, you need an experienced company for handling potential delays at O’Hare. This single airport accounts for 20% of delays and cancellations in the country. That’s not entirely O’Hare’s fault. As such a crucial hub, it relies on other airports getting flights out on time. This doesn’t always happen.

This is why you need to be sure to work with a company that can accommodate any delays by adjusting other legs of a transport chain. For instance, if a flight coming in is delayed, can we catch it up by adjusting the schedule of pick-up, or moving it by truck or rail?

Adjusting the Transport Chain

If a flight is four hours late and forces freight to be picked up later in the day, this could ripple in ever expanding ways. A later pickup could mean that freight isn’t processed until the next morning, which means a four hour delays suddenly turns into a half day delay. The precise destination may only be shipped to once per day – that means it’s really a full day delay.

You need a shipping company to be able to avoid compounding these delays. In some circumstances, they’re unavoidable, but in many situations all it takes is a weather eye to see that an extra pick-up should be scheduled in at the airport, or a local pick-up needs to include an additional destination to make up time on a shipment. We’re experienced in looking at transport chains and seeing how different elements can be adjusted and swapped out. This helps us minimize the impact of events like airport and weather delays.