Welcome to Air Cargo Chronicles from Air Cargo News Flying Typers.
     Let us begin our great adventure with a simple truth that’s easy to miss: the modern world runs on air cargo.
     Your medicine, electronics, the spare part that keeps a factory from going silent, the fresh food, the pharma that shows up on time and saves the day.
It all moves because people decided, decades ago, that speed could be a business—not just a miracle.
     Yet most of us couldn’t name the people who built that system.
     We know the passenger side of aviation because it’s glamorous. Cargo is different.
     It’s quieter. It happens at night, behind hangars, in warehouses, in paperwork, in those decisions that don’t make headlines but keep economies alive.
     That’s why we’re creating this series. Not as a corporate timeline, not as a list of aircraft types, but as a human story.
     Air Cargo Chronicles will continue in these pages twice monthly for the next year and a half as a long-term storytelling project.
     Our stories will appear from the time when air cargo wasn’t a machine yet—it was an idea, held together with persuasion, improvisation, and stubborn optimism.

The First Air Cargo Journalists
     As we begin, we share stories written  by someone who, not only witnessed that era—he documented it as it unfolded—Richard Malkin.
     If air cargo has a first storyteller, it’s him.
     Richard Malkin was the first air cargo journalist in America and founding editor of the first dedicated air cargo publication Air Transportation Magazine founded in 1942. During those early years, as Richard, with no knowledge of cargo or shipping, in his own words expressed, "Bit by urgent bit, the essential pieces came together and fell into reasonable place. The airlines’ press releases—primarily those from American, United, TWA, Eastern, and Pan American—told me little or nothing about shipping by air, but over time I became passably familiar with the traffic and operations sides of the business."

      At the end of World War II Richard got the story first hand on the ground during The Berlin Airlift at Tempelhof Airport; at Frankfurt Main and elsewhere in Germany during 1948.
     Malkin’s path into aviation wasn’t some childhood dream of flight. It was practical. He was a New York journalist, doing local papers in the Bronx and beyond, and he took an editing job in the early 1940s because it offered stability. But that “temporary” move turned into a life’s work—something like six decades of telling air cargo’s story, from the earliest scramble to the modern supply chain.
     He edited several air cargo publications, as they evolved and changed names and identities, capturing the industry while it was still trying to decide what it even was. Later he worked with major trade titles, including Cargo Vision Magazine for KLM Cargo and he spent time with us at the original Air Cargo News, founded in New York City in 1975.
     Then, in what might be the wildest chapter, he came back again at 100 years of age and kept writing—interviews, recollections, feature stories—pulling together a personal archive  for our series Air Cargo Chronicles that stretches back to the 1940s.

Air Cargo From The Beginnings
     So here appearing in one place for the first time will unfold a century of memory, plus files and clippings and first-hand reporting, turned into a living map—people, places, breakthroughs,  and yes, also setbacks.
     And from that map, we’re building a narrative that starts in the pre-jet era, after World War II, when cargo and mail weren’t side hustles.
     In many cases, they were what kept aviation alive.
     Back then, governments helped keep planes flying with subsidies. But those supports didn’t last forever, and the pressure changed.
     Airlines were basically told: if you want to survive long-term, you can’t rely on mail and freight alone. You’ve got to carry passengers too.
     Which sounds backwards to us now, because today passengers feel like the obvious center of aviation.
     But in those earlier decades? Mail mattered—a lot. And cargo never stopped evolving even when the spotlight drifted toward passenger travel.
     The turning point everyone remembers is the Berlin Airlift in 1948.
     Aircraft didn’t just deliver packages; they sustained a city. It proved something big to the whole world: airlift could work at scale under extreme pressure.
     After that heroic moment, commercial air cargo still had to earn its place. It couldn’t live forever on wartime reputation or surplus military airplanes.
     It had to win customers, build trust, and make money day after day in peacetime.
     When you look at the shipping numbers from around 1950, you can feel why that was such a fight.
     In the U.S. as example air cargo was measured in the hundreds of millions of ton-miles. Railroads were moving hundreds of billions.
     That’s not competition.
     That’s a canyon.

Changing Shipping Rules
     So why did anyone think air cargo had a future? Because the goal wasn’t to out-rail the railroads.
     It was to change the rules.
     Speed. Reliability. Time-sensitive shipments. High-value commodities. The kind of freight where waiting is expensive, not just inconvenient.
     That mindset is basically the seed of modern trade. Over the last half-century, we’ve watched commerce accelerate—months into weeks, weeks into days, days into hours.
     The early pioneers didn’t have a complete blueprint for that world, but they had something else: nerve, patience, and a willingness to learn fast.
     Even defining “air cargo” was complicated. Was it freight? Mail? Express? Baggage? Airlines reported numbers differently, sometimes in different units, and regulators tried to make sense of an industry that was inventing itself as it went.
     Also, the roots go further back than most people think.
     Scheduled air shipment in the U.S. existed as early as the late 1920s, and there were all kinds of early examples elsewhere—airlines moving unusual loads, bush pilots carrying goods where roads didn’t reach. It just hadn’t snapped into a recognizable, organized industry yet.
     Then the late 1940s hit, and suddenly the proof-of-concept moments got louder. Aircraft carried animals for zoos. Entire households moved by air. Perishables beat refrigeration simply by outrunning spoilage. Each strange shipment was more than a stunt. It was a message to the market: this is what speed can do.
     And this is where the story gets wonderfully human, because air cargo didn’t develop because of the airlines. It evolved because of the people in the middle—the cargo agents and the early forwarders—who walked into businesses and made the case for paying more today, to earn more tomorrow.
     That relationship was tense from the start. Airlines like control. Intermediaries create dependency. We will tell stories of blow-ups and near-boycotts, of agents fearing that big carriers would squeeze them out, and of uneasy truces where both sides realized they needed each other, at least for now.

The Originators
     Some intermediaries stood out by proving they could expand the pie instead of just taking a slice. Emery Air Freight, for example, helped define what forwarding could become—especially with consolidation and premium service—before pricing wars and competition changed the tone of the market.
     Our reporting here will also take us into the physical reality of early air freight. Not boardrooms, but fields and docks.
     We go to produce country, watching strawberries and lettuce get handled like fragile treasure. Our trips to flower growers, follow seasonal surges.
     Internationally we will see how markets worked and why certain commodities were naturally drawn to air.
     Alongside that developing action, you’ve got engineers running experiments that sound obvious now but were groundbreaking then—testing how altitude and pressure affected fruits and vegetables.
     There were also the moments of pure improvisation: cargo too heavy, too long, too awkward—so it gets strapped under a fuselage on custom beams.
     Non-scheduled “tramp” operators picking up whatever they can and hopping through a chain of airports. Truth be told, the early and even later air cargo business basically said, it was still learning to walk, and somehow it was already doing magic tricks.
     Of course, magic attracts dreamers. After the war, surplus aircraft flooded the market, and veterans came home thinking, "I flew missions—how hard can running an airline be?" One would buy a C-47 and show up looking for instructions on how to start a carrier. Multiply that by dozens, then hundreds, and you get an era of hopeful startups—some legendary, most short-lived.
     A few of those names became real forces—Flying Tigers, Slick, Seaboard. Most didn’t survive. But the failures mattered because they tested routes, rates, and demand. They proved, in public, what worked and what didn’t.
     Meanwhile, inside the major passenger airlines, cargo often lived in the shadows. You can almost picture it: a small office tucked into a hangar, someone looking down through a window at the freight floor, buried in paperwork, trying to keep things moving. In some companies, the ‘best’ people went to passengers, and cargo got whoever was left.
     And yet brilliance came out of those overlooked corners. Take one example we love: in 1944, American Airlines introduced a big aluminum container to keep shipments from shifting—an early ancestor of what we now call a ULD. They even gave it a memorable name: the Paul Bunyan Box. From a simple fix came a path toward standardization, later shaped through airline cooperation and IATA.

From Little Acorns
   That’s really the theme of this whole project. Big change often starts small. One practical solution in one cramped office becomes a global standard. One awkward argument between a carrier and an agent turns into a new business model. One risky flight proves that a supply chain can be redesigned.
     And it’s worth noting how many confident predictions floated around. Some leaders insisted cargo revenue would catch up to passenger revenue within a decade or two. Others offered longer timelines. Some were cautious, some were bold—most were wrong in one way or another, because the future doesn’t follow press releases.
     But the deeper point isn’t whether the forecasts were accurate. It’s that air cargo inspired belief. Dreams of airships hauling freight, helicopters doing heavy lift, parachute delivery in routine service. People argued about what was realistic, but dreaming is part of how industries discover their limits—and then push past them.
     So what are we building with Air Cargo Chronicles? A narrative history, yes—but also a public reference. Organized, searchable, easy to explore. A place where names won’t get lost: the innovators, the operators, the executives, the agents, the skeptics turned believers.
     The heart of this isn’t a lineup of companies, even though you’ll hear about organizations that shaped the field—from pioneering forwarders to airlines that proved new routes could work, all the way to modern payment and process innovators.
     The heart is people. They are the ones who kept going when the odds looked ridiculous. The ones who built their domain one shipment at a time. The ones whose work rarely makes it into mainstream aviation history, even though their decisions ripple into daily life across the planet.
     Anchored in all of this is that Air Cargo Chronicles will capture an era that might have vanished into a few fuzzy headlines. Thanks to that, we can tell this story with detail, texture, conflict, and context.
     As we take off with this series, keep that image in your mind: the world after the great airlifts, stepping into the 1950s, with enormous pressure and tiny market share, trying to convince shippers that speed could transform business. The canyon-sized gap. The skepticism. The improvisation. And the small group of people who looked at all that and said, "We can build an industry anyway."
     That’s the promise of Air Cargo Chronicles: we’re going to trace the human story from those humble beginnings to the present, and onward. Because the sky did not just belong to passengers.
     In many ways, the sky was always cargo’s proving ground.
     Long live air cargo. The sky is yours.
Geoffrey

Next: Air Cargo Debuts in 1910, Wright Brothers in Ohio.