"I don't want any of that," said Jeff Chestnut, a flight-control manager who shortly before 1 a.m. Tuesday was on "the bridge"—a Star Trek-style command post deep in UPS's global air-shipping hub—monitoring a snowstorm in Cologne, Germany, that was preventing one of UPS's jets from taking off. (click below to read more)
"People are expecting their presents," he said. "Grandmas have been online making sure they're going to get their gifts to their families. There are a lot of expectations out there and we don't want to let anyone down."
But the effect of a delayed package goes beyond a crestfallen kid on Christmas morning.
Weather is the biggest cost variable for freight shippers, affecting everything from flight takeoffs and landings, to added fuel costs when planes are diverted.
Freight operators generally have to eat the cost when a shipment doesn't make its delivery on time, so snow, ice, rain, and fog can frost their bottom lines.
Each late shipment will cost UPS between $5 and $30 in revenue, said spokesman Mike Mangeot.
After last winter brought some of the worst weather in decades, freight companies, from UPS to FedEx Corp., to Norfolk Southern Corp., lamented Mother Nature in their quarterly earnings calls.
"The weather just killed us in the month of February," reported Covenant Transportation Group Inc., a freight hauler, in April. The company said winter weather led to a 43% rise in fleet shutdowns compared to a normal winter quarter.
Routine weather events from snow to rain to chilly air have an estimated annual economic impact of $485 billion in the U.S., according to study published in June by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
And this holiday season, there is less wiggle room than usual to make up weather delays, said Kevin Sterling, a transportation analyst with BB&T Capital Markets. Retailers, uncertain of consumer demand, have unusually low levels of inventories, relying instead on just-in-time deliveries, he said. With online shopping, consumers are waiting until the last minute to buy presents, condensing the shipping peak into the two weeks before Christmas, UPS said.
This week, at UPS's sprawling global hub, "Worldport," which spans the length of 90 football fields in Louisville, 6,000 employees are working though the night to fulfill next-day service. Even UPS staffers with desk jobs jump in to help oversee the honey-baked hams, high-definition televisions, and everything in between coming down 155 miles of conveyer belts.
Roughly 125 jets—up from 85 the rest of the year—are arriving each night and landing between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. The packages must be sorted and then reloaded onto planes that take off before sunrise, bound mostly for U.S. cities.
UPS's biggest concern is getting cargo jets to the Louisville hub, from all over the world, by no later than 3:15 a.m., so packages can make connecting flights to their final destinations.
That logistical task falls to a small army of meteorologists, contingency planners and dispatchers who work overnight at the hub's "core" operations. FedEx has a similar setup.
UPS keeps the room dimly lit, for a calming effect—though some employees joke that they feel like they are in a casino, only with clocks and nothing left to chance.
Each holiday season, thousands apply to suit up in brown and work as a UPS "jumper," helping deliver packages during the holiday crush. WSJ's Gwendolyn Bounds dons the uniform and braves dogs, chatty seniors and nosy kids riding on the truck.
"Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, there is a palpable increase in the pressure around here," said Jim Cramer, an atmospheric scientist and one of five UPS staff meteorologists, near midnight as he swiveled in his chair to scan multiple monitors showing weather from China to the U.S.'s Great Plains.
"It doesn't look good out West," dispatcher Dave Miller told Mr. Cramer, looking at a monitor showing a storm system in the Southern Rockies.
Mr. Cramer hit a button to zoom in on UPS's hubs in that area. So far, none were in the line of the storm. "Gotta like that," he told Mr. Miller.
But Mr. Cramer was worried about fog. Freight planes can take moderate turbulence, since there are no passengers who will spill their coffee.
But fog is a huge concern. Unlike passenger planes, freight planes often land close to sunrise when fog peaks.
On a conference call with crews around the country, Mr. Cramer predicted a 30% chance of morning fog in Orlando, Dallas and Oklahoma City and a few other spots. Dispatchers would need to make sure planes were equipped to fly in low visibility if they were headed to those locations.
A "hot status board" on the wall listed cities and regions where UPS had positioned spare pilots and planes, prepared to "rescue volume," or packages stuck somewhere because of mechanical problems or visibility that makes it difficult to land.
The company says its "hot spares program" annually rescues more than one million packages that, if late, would cost UPS more than $20 million in revenue.
Near 10 p.m., a call came in from a UPS crew in Wichita, Kan. Heavy rain was affecting the aviation equipment on a jet that was due to take off in a half hour.
The jet, loaded with cargo in Wichita, was slated to travel to Springfield, Ill., where it would pick up more packages, and then continue on to Louisville, arriving at the hub at 1:16 a.m. with time for the packages to make connecting flights.
With some 5,900 packages potentially stranded in Wichita and Springfield, UPS's contingency team diverted an empty jet that was flying from Laredo, Texas to Louisville to rescue the packages at Wichita, and "sent a hot spare" to Springfield, said Steve Merchant, contingency department manager. By 2 a.m., the packages were in Louisville.
"Time is of the essence," he said, "and we have to pull the trigger."
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