Not anymore. Welcome to the new world of being charged for every millimeter you use. A world where you 150kg biker can weigh 1600kg when it comes to charges. Forget riding into a can, forget paying for your bikes volumetric weight.

This too shall pass.

Right now, due to a reduction in flights due to COVID, there is a lack of excess volumetric capacity in the belly of aircraft that are still operating. This has resulted in significant increases in the price of air freight. The same thing has happened with sea freight, although for different reasons.

Eventually, when airline schedules get back to normal (meaning, when we get back to the same or greater number of daily flights as operated pre-pandemic), opportunities will again arise to take advantage of excess cubic space in the belly of wide-body aircraft, and prices will return to pre-pandemic levels.

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As an aside, if air carriers are operating wide body aircraft on routes from Vladivostok to sun destinations in Asia, chances are far better than average that there will be excess cargo space available - simply because these aircraft are usually full of passengers and their baggage, but there is not much demand for export cargo from Vladivostok to Asia. So there might be some opportunity on the southbound flights. I doubt, though, that there will be any opportunity on the return flights to Vlad.

Michael

Yes I agree this will pass once normalisation of global air traffic resumes. At this point in time and with the current cartel of international sea freight companies holding the world to ransom this will take some time, years maybe. Currently there is no such thing as excess space so be prepared to learn about Pivot Weight the hard way unfortunately.

At the risk of entirely hijacking the thread...

The key word here is "wide-body", and that may not come back, certainly not in the same volume as before. That VVO-BKK flight I mentioned above? Looked it up, and S7 does it with an A320 NEO, which means that a)you probably can't get a ULD in there, and b)even if you could, that aircraft's belly is full of its passengers' luggage.

This is a clear trend in global aviation: airlines were already looking to start operating narrow-body aircraft on transoceanic/transcontinental routes, new planes like the A321 LR/XLR make it viable to do so, and airlines are definitely taking the opportunity with covid to swap out their legacy fleets for new, fuel-efficient, usually smaller airplanes.

Just did a week in Tenerife, and the charter was 7 hours each way on an A320, which is near-as-makes-no-difference to a flight from Western Europe to Eastern North America, or Helsinki/Istanbul to major Asian destinations. It was... not great, but not terrible - certainly I would do it again if the price was competitive. So will most other travellers. Wide-body aircraft in general will not exactly go away entirely, but will most likely stay on only the busiest routes - and finding a good opportunity to put a bike on a plane is definitely going to get harder.

Not to be pedantic, but single-aisle (narrow-body) aircraft do use ULDs (Unit Load Devices) - but unfortunately, they can't fit ULDs that are tall enough to accept a motorcycle that has not been disassembled. Your point is valid, though.

Personally, I think that we will see the return of wide-body aircraft on routes they previously operated on, simply because the economics are so attractive for the airlines. It's far more profitable to run 2 wide-body rotations on a route than to run 3 or 4 single-aisle rotations, and the higher profit comes despite ticket prices being lower when wide-bodies are used.

Single-aisle aircraft predominate on 'thin' routes with little demand, or when higher prices can be charged to business travelers who demand frequency on routes. Once this virus problem passes, demand will increase on routes that are currently thin, and we'll see the wide-bodies return.

The most attractive prices for motorcycle shipping by air are (were?) found on leisure routes when all the seats were full, passengers were restricted to minimum baggage allowances (due to cheap seats), and as a result, there was excess cubic space available down in the basement, but not a lot of excess payload (weight) available. This creates a situation where you can load a LD6 with a motorcycle in it (total weight about 1,000 pounds) because you have the space, but you can't load a LD6 with a normal load of 6,000 pounds because you don't have the payload capacity.

TL;DR: Once air travel gets back to normal, attractive motorcycle air freight rates will return.

Michael