The hardest problem in air cargo trucking isn't the flying part. It's the booking of road feeder slots — the trucked legs that stitch airport-to-airport networks together — and the management systems around them remain, for many operators, a stubbornly manual affair.

Road feeder services move freight between airports on behalf of airlines and forwarders, effectively extending an airline's network without adding aircraft. When the slot-management layer behind those truck movements works badly, freight misses connections. Then the phone calls start.

Air Cargo News this week examines why slot management for road feeder operations has become such a persistent challenge for the sector — and why fixing it has proved harder than it sounds.

What's actually going wrong?

The piece frames the issue as systemic rather than incidental. Road feeder capacity is scheduled, booked and re-booked across many parties: airlines, ground handlers, trucking subcontractors and forwarders. Each handoff is a chance for information to degrade.

A slot is, on paper, a simple thing. A truck, a time, a place. In practice it sits inside a chain of systems that don't talk to each other, so the industry leans on email and human memory. Anyone who has worked a ramp at 2am knows how that ends.

What does this change for shippers?

For now, not much — and that's rather the point. Shippers experience road feeder dysfunction as delayed freight and vague ETAs, not as a visible systems failure. Forwarders and carriers feel it more directly, in missed trucking slots and re-worked routings that eat into already thin margins.

The commercial stake is real. Every slot that goes unused because a booking was mis-communicated is capacity paid for and wasted. In a market where trucking capacity around major hubs is tight, that waste compounds quickly.

The road ahead

The Air Cargo News analysis suggests the sector knows the answer in principle: better slot-management tooling and cleaner data exchange between parties. Execution is the hard part, as it usually is in air cargo's ground operations.

Expect the pressure to build. As airlines push more freight onto trucked legs to free belly and freighter capacity for long-haul lanes, the volume flowing through road feeder networks only grows — and with it, the cost of running those networks on goodwill and spreadsheets.

Whether operators invest in proper systems before the next peak season tests them, or after, is the question. History offers its own dry answer.