2026 wasted zero time humbling AOG logistics teams.
Barely weeks after people stopped nursing their New Year’s Eve hangovers, Winter Storm Fern slammed air networks shut, wiped out service to over 3,000 ZIP codes, and parts shipments that aircraft operators were counting on simply stopped moving.
Maintenance windows closed. Fleets sat. Revenue bled.
The painful truth set in fast: teams who weathered Fern without issues had spent months doing the tedious, thankless work of vetting backup carriers, mapping alternate ground routes, and building contingency plans that could hold weight under real pressure.
Everyone else learned that hoping your AOG logistics network survives a crisis is a strategy with a shelf life of exactly one disruption.
We’re still early in the year, with a clear opening to get sharper before the next storm, outage, or bottleneck forces your hand. These are the priorities where that work starts.
Many AOG logistics teams lean heavily on air charters, and for good reason. They handle roughly 22% of U.S. cargo freight and can get a full aircraft airborne within hours.
But Fern exposed what happens when that single lane locks up: pricing spikes, capacity vanishes, and you’re stuck bidding against every other grounded operator for the same limited slots.
That’s where hotshot and expedited ground networks earn their keep.
Carriers running 24/7/365 AOG truck teams with two-driver relays can move parts cross-country in 48 hours, often matching “next-flight” air timelines. The cost difference speaks for itself too: a 500-mile engine delivery might run $1K to $1.5K by truck versus roughly $25K by charter. Plus, when flights are grounded or cargo holds are full, a rolling truck keeps that part in motion while your competitors sit on hold with brokers.
Expanding your modes only works if you’ve also spread your coverage geographically. A single hub or carrier relationship looks efficient on paper until a localized event takes it offline. Fern proved that again when carrier load rejections jumped to 10-12% in markets like Chicago and Harrisburg practically overnight.
Weather isn’t the only threat, either. FMCSA enforcement pulled roughly 10,000 drivers out of service in 2025 alone over violations like English proficiency failures. A regional safety blitz can pinch capacity just as fast as a storm.
Absorbing such hits revolves around one strategic habit: mapping alternate routing before trouble shows up. Think multiple vetted carriers across regions and modes, pre-approved backup corridors, and automatic rerouting when a hub freezes or a runway closes.
No single point of failure should ever paralyze a delivery.
Redundant carriers and alternate routes only help if you know something’s gone wrong before a phone rings in the middle of the night. That’s where most AOG logistics operations still have a blind spot.
Every critical shipment should carry end-to-end tracking, whether that’s IoT sensors, carrier portal feeds, or your 3PL platform. You want automated alerts firing on missed milestones and stalled handoffs, not a dispatcher discovering a problem six hours late. The difference between catching a delay at hour one versus hour six often decides whether an aircraft flies tomorrow or sits.
KPMG recommends tracking time-to-detect and time-to-respond on key lanes, and that advice holds weight here. Measure how fast your team spots deviations. Put a number on it. Then tighten that window quarter over quarter. When a flight cancels or a customs hold appears, that early warning is what gives your planners room to reroute before one missed connection grounds a fleet.
All the visibility and routing flexibility in the world won’t help if the part you need doesn’t exist on this side of the Pacific. And right now, that risk is real.
Chinese New Year 2026 just kicked off, but most factories across China and Southeast Asia started winding down by late January. That creates a six- to eight-week global supply gap where Asian suppliers stop accepting new orders and production crawls back at roughly 35% capacity through early March. Smart AOG logistics teams locked in orders and moved critical spares stateside by mid-December.
If you didn’t do that this year, put it on the calendar for next year. Right now.
The broader MRO picture and maintenance super cycle make pre-positioning even more urgent and compound the problem too. Aging fleets, labor shortages, and production bottlenecks have stretched lead times on engines, landing gear, and avionics from weeks to months. Build safety stock on your highest-failure components or work with your AOG provider to stage reserves at major hubs.
The base supply chain won’t loosen up soon, so your buffers need to reflect that.
Stocking up on critical parts is smart until the cost of those parts shifts under your feet. And that’s exactly where things stand right now.
The U.S. Supreme Court is deciding whether broad tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act are even legal. Around 34 million import entries and $130 billion in duties ride on the outcome.
If the court upholds them, your AOG logistics costs stay inflated. If it strikes them down, retroactive refunds hit the table and future pricing drops. A ruling could come any day.
So plan for both. Keep current tariff assumptions in your budgets, but document every affected shipment down to the entry date and duties paid. When the decision drops, the teams that tracked this closely will move first on refunds or renegotiated sourcing. Everyone else will be playing catch-up.
You can source the right part, route it perfectly, and still watch it sit at a dock because someone missed a paperwork change. Two recent regulatory updates are already creating exactly that problem.
Since last August, the U.S. $800 de minimis exemption is gone. Every shipment, no matter how small, needs a formal customs entry with HTS codes, declared values, and importer details. If your booking systems haven’t caught up, they will cost you time on an AOG delivery you can’t afford to lose.
IATA’s 2026 Dangerous Goods Regulations also tightened the screws on January 1. Lithium batteries now ship at 30% charge or below, and several items that flew on passenger aircraft last year are cargo-only. Get your docs current and your team retrained on hazmat before a compliance gap grounds the part instead of the plane.
Every priority on this list gets easier with the right partner behind it. And a lot harder to pull off alone.
The best AOG logistics providers live in this world every day.
They run 24/7 live dispatch, maintain vetted carrier networks across every mode, and handle last-minute bookings and same-day customs clearance without breaking a sweat. When you call at 3 a.m. with a grounded aircraft, they already know the fastest ground route and who’s available to run it.
Look for providers using AI to reroute and reprice in real time when conditions change. Demand shared visibility where your maintenance, ops, and procurement teams all see the same shipment status simultaneously. The days of stitching together updates from phone calls and email chains can’t keep up with AOG freight. You need one platform, one view, and a partner who moves as fast as the problem does.
None of this stuff is complicated. It’s just hard to do consistently when you’re already buried putting out today’s fires. But every AOG logistics team that got burned by Fern, or tariff whiplash, or a hazmat hold had the same realization afterward: they knew they should have done this work sooner. The gap between knowing and doing is where aircraft sit on the ground. Close it now while you still have runway before the next crisis picks that gap apart for you.
Carrier 911 closes it with you. We run expedited ground transport purpose-built for AOG freight, with 24/7 hotshot teams, final- mile delivery to the hangar, and a tech platform that tracks, reroutes, and keeps everyone on your team seeing the same thing at the same time. In other words, we’re the “Easy Button” you’ve been looking for the whole time, when time is of the essence, and you have an aircraft to get back in the air.
Request a demo today and see how we handle a live AOG scenario.
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