Air Cargo Routes and Aviation Hubs

Global air cargo is organized around a hub-and-spoke model pioneered by the express integrators. Federal Express, founded by Fred Smith in 1971 and renamed FedEx in the 1990s, built its central sorting facility, the Memphis SuperHub, at Memphis International Airport beginning operations in 1973, routing packages from across the country into Memphis overnight for sorting and onward dispatch rather than shipping directly between origin and destination cities. United Parcel Service developed an equivalent hub, Worldport, at Louisville International Airport in Kentucky, expanded substantially in 2002 into one of the largest fully automated package-sorting facilities in the world, while DHL, owned by Deutsche Post, centers its intercontinental network on a purpose-built hub at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany, opened in 2008.