Clearjet leverages narrowbody aircraft for air parcel service at ground rates

Under the service, Clearjet’s regional surface partners sweep the first mile at customer locations and then truck to any of the nine airports in the Clearjet network located in the East, West, Midwest and South. Clearjet manages the on-airport sortation and then moves the parcels to the respective airlines. Upon the flight’s arrival, Clearjet either tenders the parcels to regional partners for final delivery or it meets the flight, and the shipments, with its own delivery vehicles.

Clearjet’s model is akin to a zone-skipping service, a practice in which package volumes are delivered to a carrier’s hub local to the package’s final destination. Doing so allows the shipper to decrease its costs by skipping most of the eight carrier zones that divide the U.S. transportation market. Zone skipping is generally most cost-effective when it involves large package volumes.

Clearjet’s focus is on zones 6 through 8 because they involve the longest delivery distances. However, Guggenheim said that regional truckers can also pick up their own shorter-haul parcels when they make their initial sweeps for Clearjet, thus turning his company into a de facto zone 2-8 provider.

The typical narrowbody has an available payload of about 3,000 pounds. Still, that’s enough to move a fair amount of 10-pound or lighter packages, which is Clearjet’s sweet spot, Guggenheim said.

Customers include third-party logistics providers, apparel, fashion and cosmetics companies, and e-commerce sites managed by Shopify, Guggenheim said. 

Clearjet has also found passenger airlines to be a receptive audience, Guggenheim said, as the U.S. Postal Service continues to shift more parcels from air to ground as part of the agency’s “Deliver for America” campaign, thus siphoning business away from all types of airlines. 

Clearjet has no problem using widebodies if they weren’t spoken for by larger users, Guggenheim said. “Widebodies get taken up quick,” he said. Clearjet doesn’t accept hazardous materials shipments. It also eschews the airlift of integrated carriers like FedEx Corp. (NYSE: FDX) and UPS Inc. (NYSE: UPS).

One of the risks of the model are the potential disruptions caused by dynamic passenger schedules. To counter that, Clearjet stations employees at each airport to shift parcels onto other flights if the original belly lift is scrubbed, Guggenheim said.

Guggenheim founded Clearjet as a by-product of his longtime work in the e-commerce music fulfillment space, where he still is a major player. (Guggenheim’s music company, OneLive, fulfilled all of the VIP ticket packages for Taylor Swift’s The Eras megatour.) 

His music company was an exclusive user of FedEx, UPS and the Postal Service. While he was satisfied with their on-time performances, Guggenheim chafed at the dense, complex contracts, especially from FedEx and UPS, that always seemed to put parcel shippers on the back foot. He also grew tired of rate hikes and increased accessorial charges that became an annual and onerous event for him and his customers.

That experience as a music fulfillment provider led him to explore alternatives to the national carriers.