e-AWB comes in and the airway bill goes out.

Absent the airway bill and its associated shipping manifest, now what?

Simply, we, the e-AWB adopters, must make sure FWB and FHL are sent and received successfully. 

It is not the fault of going paperless. It is a matter of putting a new process in place. Just like AMS house keeping, we need to establish an e-AWB house-keeping process.

Perhaps the e-AWB SOP should include a step of checking if FWB and FHL are sent, when, how, what if not and if then. We just need to transition ourselves from a paper-controlled process to a new, paper-free environment where people get their jobs done by depending less and less on interchange of paperwork.

This transition from paper to no paper is not at all about how many trees we can save (are you kidding me), but a paradigm shift. It is so badly needed for our struggling air cargo industry. 

“e-freight flies. Paper lies,” quipped one cargo veteran. To be blunt, I would rephrase it as:

e-freight won’t fly until after we stop the paper nonsense.