Known consignor, regulated agent and screening: who secures air cargo

Air cargo flies only if somebody accountable says it is secure. A known consignor is a business approved to present its own cargo as already secure; a regulated agent is the party that applies or verifies the controls. The approvals attach to individual sites, and a known consignor's listing runs for a maximum of 18 months against a regulated agent's 5 years. This sets out who holds what, and why the cut-off that matters is the shed's rather than the flight's.

What is a known consignor?

A known consignor is a business approved to present air cargo as already secure. The Aviation Security (Air Cargo Agents) Regulations 2024 define it as a party that originates cargo for its own account and whose procedures meet security rules and standards sufficient to allow carriage of cargo or mail on any civil aircraft.

Read the two halves separately, because both are conditions. The cargo must be the consignor's own — this is not a status a forwarder can hold for somebody else's goods — and the procedures have to be good enough that no further security control is needed before the consignment is loaded.

The commercial effect is a queue you do not join. Cargo arriving with secure status goes forward to be loaded; cargo arriving without it has to have security controls applied first, and that is where the time goes.

What is a regulated agent?

The party that applies those controls. The same Regulations define a regulated agent as an entity that ensures security controls in respect of cargo or mail to be carried on board civil aircraft, and the definition expressly includes air carriers, freight forwarders and agents.

So the two statuses answer different questions. A known consignor says the cargo was secure when it left its own premises; a regulated agent says somebody accountable has made it secure, or has verified that it already was. A consignment needs one of those two things to be true before it flies.

A third category exists alongside them. The Regulations also provide for regulated suppliers, which covers in-flight supplies rather than cargo — relevant to anybody delivering to an airline rather than shipping through one.

How long does an approval last?

Between 18 months and 5 years, depending on the category. The Secretary of State may maintain a list of approved air cargo agents divided into categories, and the Regulations set a maximum duration for each.

The asymmetry is the useful detail. A known consignor's approval runs for well under half the term of a regulated agent's, so the status needs renewing roughly every year and a half — and an exporter that has had it for years can still be between approvals at the moment it matters. If your air freight plan assumes secure status, the expiry date belongs in the plan.

Why is the status granted per site rather than per company?

Because security is a property of a building and its procedures, not of a legal entity. The Regulations require individual sites handling cargo to be listed separately, which means approval attaches to the premises where the goods are packed and held.

That has a consequence most exporters discover the hard way. A company with secure status at its main plant does not automatically have it at a second warehouse, a contract packer or a new distribution centre — so a consignment that routes through the unapproved site loses the status the approved one would have given it.

It also means a site move is a security event rather than an address change. Unlike a certificate that follows the company, this one stays with the postcode it was inspected at, so a relocation has to be planned around the approval rather than the other way round.

What happens to cargo without secure status?

It gets security controls applied by a regulated agent before it can be loaded, and that is a physical process with physical constraints.

1. The consignment is presented to a regulated agent rather than straight to the airline.
2. Controls are applied — screening by one or more approved methods, or other measures the agent is approved to use.
3. The consignment is recorded as secure and goes forward for loading.
4. Anything that cannot be cleared by the available method waits for one that can, or does not fly.

The fourth step is the one that breaks schedules. Some goods are difficult to screen by a given method — dense, bulky, tightly packed or awkwardly shaped — and a consignment that defeats the equipment at the shed does not become easier because a flight is leaving.

Why does this change your transit time?

Because it adds a stop with a queue in it, before the flight that the quote was built around. The difference between secure and unsecured cargo is not a fee; it is a leg.

Unlike a customs hold, which is resolved with documents, a security control is resolved with handling capacity. That makes it harder to expedite: paperwork can be sent in minutes and a screening queue cannot. Our how long customs clearance takes article covers the customs half of the same wait, and the two are independent — a consignment can clear customs and still be waiting on security.

For time-critical work this is the argument for planning the status rather than the flight. Our AOG page covers the end of the market where that distinction decides whether an aircraft moves.

Who holds which status in a typical export chain?

Four parties, and the exporter is the only one who can hold the status that saves time.

The last row is the one worth stating plainly, because it is where assumptions creep in. A courier is not a security status; it is a vehicle. What a carrier can do is keep the consignment intact and documented between two parties who do hold a status, which is a chain-of-custody job rather than an approval.

How is the cargo actually loaded?

Into a unit load device, which is the container or pallet the aircraft is built to take. A ULD is not a shipping container: it is shaped to the curve of a fuselage, which is why air freight dimensions behave so differently from road ones.

That shape is a constraint rather than a detail. A consignment that fits a 2.4-metre-wide trailer may not fit the usable height of a lower-deck ULD, and a tall pallet frequently loses the top of its footprint to the taper. Measuring for air freight therefore means measuring against the device, not against a van — and the charge follows the volume either way, as our chargeable weight article sets out.

Build-up is also where the consignment stops being yours in any practical sense. Once goods are consolidated into a ULD with other shippers' freight, they move as a unit, and a single unsecured or unscreenable item in that unit is everybody's delay.

That shared fate is worth understanding before choosing between a consolidated and a dedicated booking. On a consolidation you inherit the weakest consignment in the device; on a dedicated unit you do not, which is part of what the premium buys and is rarely explained as such. Our groupage article makes the same trade on the road, where the consequence is a delivery window rather than a flight.

What should you ask before booking air freight?

Five questions, and none of them is about the airline.

1. Does the shipping site hold known consignor status, and when does the listing expire?
2. Is the cargo leaving from that site, or from a second location that is not listed?
3. Who is the regulated agent in the chain, and where does the consignment go to be screened?
4. Is the packing screenable by the method that agent uses?
5. What is the cut-off for secure cargo, as opposed to the flight time?

The last question is the one that most often turns out to be the real deadline. A flight time is a fact about the aircraft; the cut-off is a fact about the shed, and it is earlier. Booking a road leg against the flight rather than against the cut-off is the commonest way a consignment arrives on time and still misses its aircraft.

What is our part in this?

We are a road carrier and we hold no air cargo security approval of any kind: not a regulated agent, not a known consignor, and we do not screen anything. Where a consignment must be treated as secure in transit between two approved parties, that is a job for a carrier with the relevant approval, and we say so rather than taking it.

What we do on the air freight side is the landside road leg — collecting inbound consignments from cargo handlers once they have been released, and delivering outbound freight to a forwarder or handler who holds the status. Our Heathrow cargo collections page sets out that work and air freight the wider service.

For the paperwork rather than the security regime, see air waybills and export licences — the second of which stops a consignment for an entirely different reason, and earlier. For what the airport itself does, our Heathrow page covers the ground side.