Air Cargo Handling: Hand-Loaded Holds to ABB Robots

Air cargo handling is the work that happens between a shipper's truck and the belly of a plane: checking freight in, building it onto pallets and containers, storing it and loading it on time. For most of aviation history people did nearly all of it by hand. Today the biggest terminals store containers in automated racks run by software, and robots are starting to take on the loose boxes. This post covers how freight was handled in the early days, how containers and automated terminals arrived, what is changing in 2026, and where ABB robots could fit.

Unit load devices on dollies on the apron at Frankfurt Airport, 2020. Photo: kallerna / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From a bolt of silk to the Berlin Airlift

The first air cargo flight carried silk. On 7 November 1910 Philip Parmelee flew a Wright Model B 65 miles from Dayton to Columbus, Ohio, with 200 pounds of silk for a store opening. Airmail followed in February 1911 in British India, when Henri Pequet flew 6,500 letters from Allahabad to Naini. For decades after that, freight and mail went into small aircraft holds one bag or crate at a time, lifted and stacked by ground crews who had to fit everything around the shape of the fuselage.

Bags of airmail being loaded into an aircraft by hand in Japan, 1954. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Berlin Airlift showed how much hand labour this took. Over the 330 days up to 12 May 1949, Allied aircraft flew about 2.26 million tons of supplies into West Berlin, around 6,800 tons a day. Bags of flour and coal were carried off the planes by hand, often by crews of German workers. Even so, worldwide air freight was still small. By the mid 1950s it had only reached about 800,000 tonnes a year, because most cargo planes could only take loose pieces through narrow doors.

Berlin children watch flour being unloaded from a C-74 Globemaster at Gatow during the Berlin Airlift, August 1948. Photo: US Department of Agriculture via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Wide body jets changed the job. Boeing launched the 747 in 1968, and it was the first aircraft that could carry full pallets in its cargo hold. Freight was now built up on the ground into unit load devices, or ULDs: standard pallets and containers that slide into the aircraft on rollers. A common lower deck container, the LD3, holds 4.5 cubic metres. Terminals added roller decks, stacker cranes and elevating transfer vehicles, or ETVs, that move ULDs in and out of high racks, so a crew could build and store loads ahead of each flight.

The raised nose cargo door of a Boeing 747-8F freighter. Photo: Olivier Cleynen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Automated cargo terminals in 2026

Hong Kong's Hactl went further than most. The company, founded in 1971, moved to the new airport at Chek Lap Kok in 1998 and opened SuperTerminal 1 at a reported cost of US$1 billion. Its Container Storage System held 3,500 loaded ULDs on six levels, served by 14 driverless container cranes, and a Box Storage System kept loose cargo in 10,000 storage positions and delivered it to the pallet building area on demand. Air Cargo Week reported in 2024 that both systems still run around the clock, and that Hactl added a robotic spare parts store for its engineers in 2021.

Hactl's SuperTerminal 1 at Hong Kong International Airport, 2005. Photo: 林高志 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Other terminals are upgrading now. On 30 September 2026 Lödige Industries reported that Air Canada Cargo had finished a year on its Cargo Professional control software at Toronto Pearson, after switching over the old system at midnight and resuming operations an hour later. The terminal handled more than a quarter of a million tonnes in the first ten full months. Next come a new ETV and a mobile transfer device, and parts of the terminal are being prepared for an automated storage and retrieval system.

AKE containers, the LD3 type, lined up for loading at Melbourne Airport, 2026. Photo: Sgroey / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB has no announced air cargo terminal project, so its role here is a possibility. The racks and ETVs are made by specialists such as Lödige. The gap is the loose freight: thousands of boxes that people still stack onto pallets by hand. ABB's IRB 660 and IRB 460 palletizing robots already stack cartons at the end of factory lines, and its Robotic Item Picker and Robotic Parcel Inductor use vision to pick mixed items and parcels. Similar cells could build pallets of uniform boxes or sort express parcels, as robots already do in airport baggage handling.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxed products at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

What automated air cargo handling still has to solve

Over the next few years terminals will try to tie the paperwork to the physical handling. Lödige says its software reduces manual input and helps prevent errors, which matters because documents, bookings and truck slots that do not match the freight on the dock cause many delays. When the software knows what is coming and when, robots and mobile vehicles can have the right ULD or box ready. Autonomous mobile robots such as ABB's Flexley Mover, which moves loads around a plant without fixed tracks, could shuttle loose cargo between storage and build-up stations.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying crates. Photo: ABB

Building a ULD is still hard to automate. Air freight is mixed: a pallet may hold boxes of different sizes, drums, crates and odd shapes, and it has to match the curved outline of the aircraft and stay inside weight and balance limits. People do this with judgement built over years. Robots handle uniform cartons well, which is why express and e-commerce parcels are the first freight they touch. Mixed general cargo will take better vision, better planning software and grippers that can handle anything from a carton to a crate.

ABB's Robotic Item Picker uses AI vision to grab unknown items from mixed bins. Photo: ABB

Cost and space are the other limits. Terminals sit on expensive airport land and run around the clock, so any robot cell must fit a tight footprint and keep working through peaks. Staff need new skills to supervise these systems and repair them at three in the morning. Home shoppers feel this too, since online orders from other countries often fly as air cargo and a slow terminal means a longer wait at the door. Engineers can plan such cells and check reach and cycle times in RobotStudio before anything is built.

ABB's Robotic Parcel Inductor lifting a box with its suction gripper. Photo: ABB

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