An Aircraft on Ground event costs commercial operators $10,000–$150,000 per hour — Qeep’s AOG desk responds in under two hours, anywhere in North America. When the part has to move now, we move it.
“Close enough” is not an option in aerospace — and we already know that.
Aerospace supply chains combine the most demanding elements of any freight vertical: extreme time-sensitivity (AOG events), export-control restrictions (ITAR and EAR), certified hazardous materials handling (IATA DG Class 3 hydraulic fluids, Class 8 battery acids, Class 9 lithium batteries), and white-glove care for high-value components that can cost millions of dollars. MRO (Maintenance, Repair & Overhaul) logistics requires inbound shipments of rotable parts on exchange programs timed to maintenance slot windows, while defense contractor flows demand full chain-of-custody documentation and carrier security screening. Commercial airline operators, OEM integrators like Boeing and Airbus’ tier suppliers, and MRO shops across North America need a freight partner who understands that “close enough” is not an option in aerospace.
AOG call received → live dispatcher in under 60 seconds. Carrier confirmed → within 90 minutes. Wheels rolling → under 2 hours from first contact, coast to coast.
Status updates pushed proactively every 30 minutes until delivery. No IVR. No call queue. A human, every time.
Ground expedite · sprinter to straight truck · 24 / 7 dispatch
Every hour an aircraft sits grounded costs the operator direct revenue loss plus crew and passenger disruption costs. AOG parts must clear warehouse, dispatch, transit, and sometimes customs in hours — requiring a dedicated 24/7 desk with pre-authorized emergency carrier relationships and the ability to coordinate split shipments across modes simultaneously.
Defense articles controlled under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and dual-use items under the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) require end-user verification, export license confirmation, and strict chain-of-custody documentation. Inadvertent re-export or diversion to unauthorized parties carries criminal penalties — making carrier vetting and document control non-negotiable.
Aerospace DG shipments span multiple classes — Class 3 flammable liquids (hydraulic fluid, fuel), Class 8 corrosives (battery acid), and Class 9 lithium batteries for avionics. Each requires mode-specific UN packaging, proper IATA/DOT shipping papers, and drivers or pilots trained to current DG standards. Mislabeled or improperly packaged DG shipments face rejection and fines at carrier facilities.
Aircraft components — turbine blades, avionics LRUs (line-replaceable units), composite fuselage panels — are extraordinarily sensitive to vibration, static discharge, humidity, and temperature. Standard dry-van freight practices cause damage that can ground parts for months of inspection and recertification, adding cost far exceeding the original freight bill.
MRO shops operate on tightly scheduled maintenance windows — an engine change, for example, is planned months in advance. Inbound rotables on exchange programs must arrive before the aircraft enters the hangar; outbound cores must ship immediately after removal to reset the repair cycle. Missed MRO windows cascade into deferred maintenance, regulatory squawks, and fleet availability penalties.
Qeep’s AOG line connects immediately to a live dispatcher — no IVR, no call queue. We activate the nearest available expedite unit (sprinter, straight truck, or charter air coordination) and have a confirmed ETD within two hours of your call. Shipment status updates are pushed proactively every 30 minutes until delivery.
Our operations team is briefed on ITAR/EAR handling requirements: end-user screening checks, denied-party verification, export license cross-referencing, and document retention. We restrict ITAR shipments to US-person drivers in our verified carrier pool and maintain tamper-evident sealing protocols with photographic chain-of-custody at each handoff.
Qeep holds DOT and IATA DG certifications for ground transport of all relevant aerospace hazmat classes. Our dispatch team confirms driver hazmat endorsements, verifies UN-specification packaging, and prepares shipping papers to 49 CFR and IATA DGR standards before every movement. We coordinate CHEMTREC emergency response registration for Class 3 and Class 8 loads.
High-value aerospace components ship in air-ride trailers with climate monitoring, ESD-safe packaging verification, and load-by-load cargo insurance with agreed-value coverage. Drivers are briefed on no-dock-board loading for vibration-sensitive assemblies. Our warehouse team handles clean-room-adjacent pick-pack operations for sensitive avionics using anti-static work surfaces.
We build custom MRO logistics programs aligned to maintenance base schedules: inbound delivery windows are synchronized to hangar slot times, outbound cores are pre-labeled and picked up within hours of removal. Our TMS tracks rotable serial numbers and repair-cycle status so MRO managers have complete visibility into the exchange pool at all times.
No teaching a generalist account manager what ITAR, EAR, or IATA DGR requires. We already know — and we document everything.
Time-critical freight — sprinter, straight-truck and team-driver expedites with under-hour cover.
Explore →Dedicated trailer, single shipper, point-to-point — fastest transit and full chain-of-custody.
Explore →Bonded and ambient warehousing, pick-and-pack, B2B and DTC fulfillment with WMS visibility.
Explore →Canadian aerospace manufacturing is concentrated rather than spread out, and knowing where a shipment loads changes the routing before anything else is decided. Greater Montréal is the largest cluster, with airframe, engine and simulator work and a dense supplier base around it. Southern Ontario, from Mississauga through Kitchener and into the Hamilton corridor, carries a substantial tier-two and tier-three base making machined parts, assemblies and avionics. Western Canada adds maintenance, repair and overhaul capacity alongside parts manufacturing.
That geography means most aerospace freight is either a short domestic move between suppliers, a cross-border move into the United States supply chain, or an international movement through Montréal-Trudeau, Toronto Pearson or Vancouver. Each has a different failure mode. Domestic moves fail on handling and packaging. Cross-border moves fail on documentation. International moves fail on ground time around the flight, which is the part shippers consistently underestimate.
The practical consequence is that aerospace logistics is rarely about the linehaul rate. A machined component worth six figures does not care whether the truck cost four hundred dollars or six hundred. It cares whether it arrives undamaged, whether the paperwork lets it cross, and whether it lands inside the window the receiving inspection team is working. Buying this freight on rate alone is how a cheap truck becomes an expensive scrap report.
When an aircraft is grounded, every hour is measured in money, and the right answer is whichever option actually lands the part soonest rather than whichever sounds fastest. Inside a day of driving, a dedicated van or straight truck usually wins outright, because it collects immediately, drives direct and delivers to the door without any handling in between. There is no cut-off to miss and no terminal to clear.
Between roughly one and two days of driving, team service becomes the comparison. Two drivers alternating removes the ten-hour reset and roughly halves the elapsed time, which brings Toronto to Atlanta or Montréal to Chicago into a single overnight. Beyond that, or across an ocean, air is the only real option, and then the flight time is the small part of the equation. Tendering ahead of the airline cut-off, screening, build-up, and breakdown and recovery at the far end all run on the handler schedule.
What decides an AOG movement more often than the mode is whether the paperwork is ready. A commercial invoice with a description too vague to classify, a missing certification of origin, an importer not set up on the customs portal, or an eManifest that does not reconcile with the documents in the cab will each cost hours at a border, and the hours were the whole point of expediting. On a genuine AOG the documentation is prepared in parallel with the booking, not after it.
Aerospace freight fails differently from general freight. A dented carton is a cosmetic problem on consumer goods and a rejected part on a machined component, because the receiving inspection does not care how the mark got there. Precision surfaces mark, composite structures delaminate under point loads, and anything with a certification trail that has been through an undocumented impact has to be inspected before it can be used. That is why the packaging specification is part of the shipping instruction rather than an afterthought.
In practice that means purpose-built crates and cradles for large structures, foam or moulded inserts that hold a part without letting it move inside its box, corrosion protection where the transit is long or humid, and shock and tilt indicators where the consignee wants evidence rather than assurances. Reusable containers are common for repeat flows between the same two facilities and are usually cheaper than repeated custom crating once the volume is there.
When something does arrive damaged, the file is built at the door and nowhere else. Note the damage on the delivery receipt before signing, photograph the item in the trailer or the container before it is moved, and keep the packaging exactly as it arrived. A clean signed receipt makes a claim very hard to win regardless of what actually happened. On high-value aerospace freight the declared value should also be set deliberately at booking, because standard carrier liability is frequently capped per pound and bears no relation to what the part is worth.
Aerospace parts logistics splits into two very different jobs: moving new components in a controlled manner from the supplier to the operator, and running a rotable pool where the same high-value units cycle between an operator, a repair shop and back into service. The second job is the harder one, because a rotable pool only works as well as its slowest movement, and slow movements accumulate quietly until the pool runs short of a serviceable unit at exactly the wrong moment.
The lever that matters most is turn time, and freight is a bigger part of turn time than most operators think. A landing gear, a thrust reverser or an avionics box that spends four days sitting in transit or three days waiting at customs is four or three days a serviceable unit is not available for another aircraft. Compressing those steps by even a day per direction changes how many spares a pool needs to hold, and spare units cost far more than any transport service.
Customs is where the compression is usually available. Repair movements crossing the border under temporary import provisions or repair-and-return programmes clear far faster when the documentation matches the programme, when broker instructions are set up as a template rather than reinvented per shipment, and when the receiving repair shop is on file with the border agency for that programme. We handle those setups once and then run against them, so every subsequent movement is a template rather than a fresh problem.
Packaging on rotable parts is a separate discipline. The same shipping container has to survive many round trips, protect a high-value unit from shock and static, allow inspection without disassembly, and be recognised at the repair shop as belonging to a specific pool rather than pooled with other operators’ hardware. Investing in the container fleet on the front end pays back in reduced damage and cleaner tracking for the life of the programme.
Finally, the reporting closes the pool. An operator needs to know at any moment which units are with which shop, which are in transit and which are ready to be reissued, and needs those views tied to the individual serial numbers rather than to a shipment count. We keep the tracking at the serial level and reconcile it against the shop and the operator each week, because a pool that is not reconciled quietly loses units and the loss is only discovered when the next AOG event finds no serviceable spare on hand.
Tell us the origin, destination and mode. A Qeep specialist replies within 10 minutes with live capacity, lane price, and a transit window you can actually plan around.