Some years back, there was a "can't happen" problem with a telephone switch, such that the problem had "contaminated" the running databases on both processor cards, and the system was no longer capable of recovering itself. It needed a new card, and it needed it yesterday.

The manufacturer scrambled it down to the local airport, where they bought it a passenger ticket on the next plane out. While it was in the air, they arranged for an express courier in the destination city to pick it up from the airport and break the speed limit all the way to the phone office. Whereupon the driver asked the recipient which driveway to use because "the one that looks like the main entrance doesn't look like it's meant for truck traffic".

Truck? What?

Evidently the courier service heard the declared value of the shipment and just assumed it must be enormous, so they sent a semi. This enormous truck had picked it up and had been hurtling down the road, empty, with a pizza-box-sized parcel on the floor of the cab, where it would be safer.

It’s hilarious because as I was reading your story, I assumed the exact same thing. I was picturing how they got some giant telephone switch on a flight and imagined a giant machine on the window seat.

I would’ve been part of the chain that got a semi out to deliver it.

I’ve been that guy. I hired a long wheelbase van here and ended up driving 6x DIMMs in a box on the front seat.

Better to be over prepared than under prepared.

plus, you look official like that.

One time someone in our family needed drugs delivered on a very time sensitive basis.

The specialty pharmacy fucked around and found out. I social engineered my way up the chain of command, interrupting the medical director’s dinner. They ended up hiring a courier to fly it halfway across the country. A dude showed up the doorstep at 4AM (four hours before it was needed) with a box packed with dry ice. The poor courier dude had a three hour cab ride, which probably cost more than the drug.

I made the courier and driver breakfast and coffee. The courier was fascinating, he had great stories and basically had a career mostly built on corporate screw-ups.

There are opposite versions of that story where the drug is a specialized 1-off custom living biological product (often a patient's own engineered immune cells). An entire company's years of effort and existence are tightly coupled to a patient's survival, and sometimes they're hundreds of miles apart.

Those plane tickets, with coolers of ice in hand, are crazy to me.

And yeah, there are those cases where batch 1 was sent 'on time' with Courier 1 who didn't realize what they had, and let it thaw. And so backup batch 2 was sent 'super-express' with Courier 2 with minutes notice.

This sounds fascinating -- do tell more! Was this for a large cap company CEO?

The existence of these kinds of things makes me both happy and sad.

Happy - human technology is capable of these things.

Sad - only the hyper-wealthy can afford it.

Hopefully in 20 years treatments like these will be accessible to 'commoners'. So much progress has been made in the last 50 years that I wonder what the next 50 hold.

> Hopefully in 20 years treatments like these will be accessible to 'commoners'.

And we will have clean fusion energy while our General AI robots take care of our needs. Maybe just bigger smartphones, who knows?

> I've had friends who worked in the oil and gas industry. One story I was told was where parts were desperately needed to repair a drill bit on a gas platform. The best option? Someone would fly halfway around the world, drive to a particular factory, wait for the parts and then fly back. This was cheaper and faster than any courier service, even if you spent $10,000+ on the ticket.

I was a summer student at a company that manufactured top drives for drill rigs. My days were mostly spent filing drawings and preparing documentation packages. One morning when I arrived at work, the head of the department asked me, "do you have a passport?"

He gave me a package of documents, an 18" machined steel rod and tickets for a flight that was roughly three hours from takeoff.

After driving home to pick up my passport and then across town to the airport, I didn't have enough time to check bags or even read the documentation I'd been given. I guessed the value of the part being 'under $1000' and US customs took me aside. While I was waiting, I read the documentation and discovered it was worth ~$50, though customs let me go before I could tell them.

Shockingly, I didn't have any trouble at security carrying the metal rod. I stepped onto the plane and they closed the doors behind me.

I was told that the downtime cost around $100,000 per hour, and that I was bringing the second replacement part. The first one sent was too small, which delayed repairs by a day.

In any case, that was my first (and thus far only) visit to Grand Junction, Colorado. I was kind of surprised that Canadian customs gave me way more hassle on my return the next day, despite that I had all my documents in order by then.

About 10 years ago I worked for a vendor of PCIe cards that were mainly sold to OEMs as a component of systems with 6- or 7-figure price tags. One of our customers discovered a critical bug that required reprogramming an FPGA on the card to fix. There were hundreds of cards in inventory at the customer's contract manufacturer's locations in Singapore, Scotland, and Texas. They stopped all three production lines and demanded we send someone to the locations to reprogram all of the cards.

So I was on a redeye that night from California to Texas with a Shuttle Cube w/PCIe slot and an ESD wrist strap under my arm. After reprogramming all of the cards in Texas it was back to the airport to catch another overnight flight to Scotland. Then after doing those cards it was on to Singapore, but I did get to stay one night in a hotel in Scotland since the soonest flight was the next morning. After doing the Singapore cards it was one night in Singapore and then back to California. Around the world in 5 days.

I'll throw in my "strange things flying on planes" story.

An ex-girlfriend worked for a large yogurt manufacturer. One of their manufacturing plants had an issue with "the culture" (the bacterial culture used for fermenting the yogurt, that is). She said product was exploding out of containers in the incubation rooms.

The operators decided to sterilize the plant and bring a sample of bacterial culture from another of the company's plants. An employee was paid to ride in a first class seat beside a temperature-controlled container of bacterial culture.

Decades ago, my university's solar car team had a problem at the competition. Their super light magnesium wheels were cracking and failing. The team's biggest supporter and a true pioneer of CNC machining, Chuck, started calling around to local machine shops to see if anyone could turn some new wheels out of aluminum. He found one machinist who agreed to do the work, but laughed because he knew there wasn't any aluminum billet large enough anywhere in the state. Chuck made a few more phone calls, and an hour later there were 4 large aluminum billets on their way from Michigan in a Cessna. That machinist had a very long night!

Of course, the team decided not to use those aluminum wheels and instead tried to round off any sharp edges on the remaining magnesium ones. Another wheel broke and the car was damaged too much to continue competing.

If somebody pulls strings like that for you, you need to use the aluminum wheels.

Depends on whether Chuck confirmed they wanted to do a thing like that first.

Fair enough, but I think I still would have used the Al wheels. They used known defective wheels, wrecked their project, didn't cross the finish line and potentially upset a big supporter. Not the kind of thing I'd do in a startup, at least.

Look at me though, judging people's decisions on the internet through a second hand story.

Chuck actually recently published a book, documenting his career within CNC machining. He started a company whose product became the gold standard for CNC software for decades.

https://www.amazon.com/Tech-Cold-Steel-Computer-Aided-Manufa...

Thanks for posting that. I'm totally grabbing that book.

For anybody else interested I did some search-engining on Chuck Hutchins' name and came up with this neat blurb about him: https://www.machinedesign.com/archive/article/21818368/the-c...

I imagine it was identified as one of several possible solutions, and the team pursued more than one solution in parallel. As a non-mechanical engineer, I personally would have voted for the aluminum.

>> And each day of non-operation cost hundreds of thousands of dollars...

My close relative worked off shore for decades. Sometimes a down large production platform is a MILLION dollars an hour. Flying someone anywhere with a $250,000 part in their hands is nothing. There are entire industries built around "getting things to the rig/platform" faster.

I'm surprised that I haven't heard of small jets (fighters/jet trainers) being used for commercial courier services (although there are instances of military jets transporting organs for transplant, https://apnews.com/article/c1309c58720c78347c1ebbbade56d35d).

They can be privately owned and operated, are very fast, and tend to have hundreds of kilos of payload capacity.

Unless you have supercruise capability (which only four fighters in the world have) flying supersonic consumes and enormous amount of fuel, so flying any distance at supersonic speeds pretty much requires aerial refueling. IIRC you also need special permission to fly supersonic in US airspace. If you're limited to subsonic speeds then there's really no advantage provided by a fighter. Private jets can fly at similar high subsonic speeds (0.9-0.95 mach or so) and are usually cheaper and more efficient to operate than fighter jets.

> Private jets can fly at similar high subsonic speeds (0.9-0.95 mach or so) and are usually cheaper and more efficient to operate than fighter jets.

Thanks, those two items were the part I was missing. (I already assumed supersonic would be out for noise/ground damage reasons)

This reminded me of "Police Camera Action - The Liver Run" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTN5X4JZFjU

30 Minutes to travel 27 miles across London in the middle of the day ! Stansted Airport, Essex to Cromwell Hospital, Kensington, London

David Nott’s book War Doctor includes a tale of him being called in to perform urgent surgery in central London, having just finished a flying lesson in Essex. He apparently called 999, asked for the Police, and after explaining the situation a car was despatched to take him at high speed through traffic. Sadly I don’t have the sort of career that would ever justify that but it sounds like great fun.

Interesting. I've seen similar "convoys" of police cars with a motorcycle platoon etc with them many times. I assumed it was some VIP. I never considered it might be a organ transplant!

I do wonder if they'd do that today - save one person's life by ploughing through central London at 70mph? There are so many cyclists and pedestrians not paying attention - it would feel safer to just helicopter it over?

They would normally have used the police helicopter back then too, but it was grounded due to a recent crash.

London now has an air ambulance service, which it didn't at the time- though the air ambulance also have some impressively fast cars (Skoda Octavia vRS IIRC) for when conditions don't allow the helicopter to fly.

I mean for something like this, a dedicated corporate jet makes sense. Might cost you $10k/flight hour but that's peanuts if every minute counts.

My understanding is that unless you actually keep a jet on standby (which has its own costs), it is surprisingly difficult to beat commercial airliners on speed if the clock starts ticking now. You can always board the next flight, but with private jets it takes time to a) find a free jet and b) prepare for the flight. Of course, the more non-standard journey you have, the more edge the private jet gets.

There’s also just a lot of commercial jets everywhere. Even if you kept private jets at every airport in the world you’d be out of luck if you needed to deliver two parts from the same location.

This is more due to safety and security requirements of the package than the economics or shipping itself. FedEx and UPS will be very happy to ship you something for a steep discount without any assumed liability, but there would be no takers for it. Providing a trusted chain of custody for the package all the way from point A to B is the real value add.

Well, “pay a dude to carry it onto and off a plane” is also a chain of custody arrangement of sorts, you just wouldn’t normally expect it to be cheaper than a company specializing in such.

It wouldn’t be if you regularly did it. But in emergency “work has halted” type of scenarios, you have plenty of labor standing around doing nothing already. And, they’ll take the task way more seriously than any courier would.

No, it's strictly speed.

This was over the Christmas-New Year period. There was a real risk of a shipment getting stuck in customs for days or possibly even weeks. An arriving passenger's luggage doesn't go through that same process. I mean it's obviously still checked by customs but it's done so immediately.

I don't know about that... shipping heavy and/or large stuff becomes very expensive even without insurance (= no assumed liability). Big shippers get big discounts from UPS and FedEx so as the little guy you get screwed by price discrimination. Airlines are a much more competitive market.

I think you can still get chain of custody, though. I have a laptop for anything touching prod and while the chain of custody needs to be kept for physical security, the value of insurance for my company is negligible. It's probably cheaper and easier for them to just eat the cost if something happens during transit than to try and deal with an insurance claim.

Another case is for shipping products to customers. With how insurance works, the insurance would cost you more than just sending the item again. However, proof of delivery is really nice for if a customer claims something was never delivered.

Back in 2000, our SF based company had a server in a datacenter in the UK die. The quickest and cheapest way to fix it was to have our IT guy take a replacement server in a suitcase and fly to the UK to replace it.

The UK die?

It’s a tool used for stamping out new UKs.

Good, because it's about time for a replacement

I think they already tried that in New England.

The server in the UK died.

Thanks.

Can verify, I've seen engineers flown out with parts to oversee repairs. Just looking at a flight tracker site and looking at how much checked baggage costs should show you it's an obvious choice.

Customs in most countries is hilariously broken, they can seize or sit on your stuff for months with no recourse and no due process.

> I've had friends who worked in the oil and gas industry. One story I was told was where parts were desperately needed to repair a drill bit on a gas platform. The best option? Someone would fly halfway around the world, drive to a particular factory, wait for the parts and then fly back.

This is normal in the IT industry. For high-value customers, vendors would be expected to fly in parts as needed. As just one example, I had a server flown in by a major reseller when the delivery service (UPS, IIRC) lost the original and the project was going to miss a critical deadline. HP's 6 hr CTR (call to repair) warranty guarantees your hardware will be restored within 6 hours of your call to support. It includes a local inventory of parts so that they can effectively replace the server if needed.

I once worked on a project with a steep late delivery penalty. We had already scheduled a "hit shot" truck, which is a dedicated semi, usually a team of 2 drivers, that drives directly, no stops, to the destination. We had scheduled it and it was 3 or 4 days to get from Denver to NYC. We were late, frantically building and assembling hardware and so just weren't ready when the truck came. We shipped the large pieces, large empty stainless steel shells in a mostly empty truck. We then took the extra 2 days to assemble the rest of the hardware and air freighted it at $50k extra cost and 1 day to get there. Basically we bought 2 days on the project for $50k and just barely made our delivery deadline.

Just to clarify, this is "hot shot".

Likewise some airlines don't even require someone to fly. I knew someone that would ship very expensive camera gear to film productions directly with an airline. They would check the cases and send it off. Someone would just go and pick it up. Obviously only really works if you're not dealing with customs.

https://www.deltacargo.com/Cargo/

I thought terrorists had done the "check your bag and don't board" thing enough for it to be disallowed. But maybe this story took place a long time ago?

Many (most?) large airlines take cargo directly like this. It's not so much "check your bag and don't board" as it is "consign this cargo shipment" which happens to be taken on the same aircraft as passengers and their luggage. Unlike checked luggage you need to declare the contents of the packages etc., and presumably there is security screening.

Terrorists these days are willing to die with the plane so it’s not such a big deal anymore I guess.

Are they? Last time I heard of this was twenty years ago or so.

Suicide bombings are still very in vogue over the world, and this has probably increased in the last 20 years.

They've always been, but historically we didn't care, why care now?

TSA has limits and they’re pretty strict with wanting to know what’s being shipped. You can’t even ship over a pound without being subject to background checks and approval.

Packages like this can be more completely, visually inspected than luggage loaded en mass, 30 minutes before flight.

A flight isn’t the only way either. Around here, a team of two brothers with a van will charge several thousand to transport parts at a moments notice to anywhere in the US, Canada or some of Mexico. They drive non-stop, one drives while the other sleeps.

Maybe not exactly a thriving industry, i.e. more like a niche.

Anecdotally I once had to fly to another EU city (some 1,200 km distance), get a rented car, drive to the house of the vendor at night (he took the pieces home after we phoned him at like 5 PM on a friday, a good reason to be friends with people) then drive to another city to be able to take an early flight back next morning.

The items were (at the x-ray machine in the airport) a bit suspect (they were drilling bits for a tunneling machine, in practice looking a lot like hand grenades) but I managed to convince the police they were spare parts/consumables.

But that was years before checks at boarding gates were tightened (yes, we could bring a water bottle) I wonder if they would pass today.

When I was in college I worked for Texas instruments, I had a summer job flying from Houston to Dallas, Plano,and other sites doing just that.

> What many may not realize is that there's a thriving industry in sending passengers on planes for the sole purpose of them taking things from A to B.

So someone out there must have made a courier-as-a-service website for this?

Sign up some people to be on standby, with a passport and a list of countries they have visa for, list them with their current location.

Person signs up to potentially make a few grand if they get the call.

Firms who are in need of a person throw in the money and the tickets.

Does that work? If I need something carried by a person from London to NYC today, what do I do?

Delta Airlines has their DASH service. Under 16 ounces, anyone can ship with them. Under 100 pounds, you will need to be a known shipper with the TSA. It's available on basically any regularly scheduled flight of theirs.

We used it on a contract job in Tennessee once, to get a replacement UPS sent. Expensive, but worth it.

all airlines have something like this. it used to be called "counter to counter"; drop off and pick it up at the airport.

my story, about 1988. we had a system in Omaha with a broken power supply (it was big, say 6U, custom voltages). there was a spare in Rapid City, and downtime was charged by the hour.

no problem, took the spare in a box to the airport. they told us it was too big for counter to counter; but a ticket could be purchased and it would be put on the plane. No, problem.

"Give me a coach ticket to Omaha." "Sorry sir, those are all sold. We do have a first class ticket available." "In that case, OK"

The box went in the cargo hold.

Yes those services exist though usually you want to send your own employee, typically a junior one.

It’s a whole industry it’s called freight forwarding, and this specific thing is the cargo division of commercial passenger airlines.

Pay the flight attendant.

Super secret things often go this way too, to avoid potential loss or theft.

I was working on the demo software for the on-stage reveal of a certain super secret cell phone from a certain manufacturer. Every time the phone had to have its firmware updated or the hardware switched out some guy had to come to my office and carry it back in-person to the HQ.

I remember one time I wrote the codename of the device on the outside of the anonymous box because I was worried the courier person might end up just leaving it at the reception at HQ and then the box would get opened by someone who shouldn't be seeing it. I thought having the codename on the outside would at least let it get routed internally to the team working on it.

I got a very, very angry phone call from someone at certain manufacturer swearing and cursing at me saying that someone could have seen the name and everything would have been exposed, blah blah. Total bullshit.

In the end the demo went ahead successfully in front of a world-wide audience. The live demo was supposed to be loaded onto some certain servers, but time ran out and it ended up running off a PC in my business partner's closet over his home DSL. A certain CEO was not aware of this as he held the device on stage. Watching the event on a stream from the BBC was a pants soiling moment.

Back in the day I upped the RAM and put a set of virtual machines on our VP of Marketing’s laptop with copies of our staging server, db, data… the works. He just started it up and browsed away.

He loved doing demos without a network connection etc. Back then WiFi was always restricted and hot spots too slow.

> That allowance was taken up by documents for various clients. This was usually quicker than any courier services at the time.

They were still a courier service. I once sat next to a guy (in first class!) who was accompanying checks to Hawaii. Yes, not so long ago they had to physically travel to the issuing bank. He was basically retired so he did this to travel, around and earn some money.

At the end of the flight they let him leave first. He told me they would let him off and he would go down to the tarmac to watch the cargo hold be unlocked and make sure the cargo wasn’t tampered with.

I’ve also had someone hand carry electronics to / from a customer. Sometimes it’s just easier.

In the Amiga community we have the legend of "Joe Pillow". That was the name under which the airline seat was booked, that would hold the precious Amiga prototype that was used to demo the machine at CES '84.

Smaller scale but it’s not uncommon for investment banks to fly junior analysts to deliver pitch books for a meeting.

Surprisingly - clearing customs in many countries can be done by a random person who is willing to take a trip out to the airport and just pay brokerage and customs fees directly. I was in Jamaica and had some telecom gear fedexed to me - I went to pick it up but didn’t have the appropriate tax ID number to do so - I was able to head to downtown Kingston, provide my passport, they gave me a TRN (kind of like a SSN) and I went back to customs, paid the $20 or so and voila - I had the device clearing customs in the same day. I often wonder if it’s that straightforward in other countries. I do know if you hire a customs broker, in say Mexico (which fedex can’t clear customs for you - unlike say Germany) - the customs broker will end up charging you $1500 in fees to clear a $1300 NUC.

It is that straightforward in most countries — I've done this exact thing many times. You save a lot of money, but you can sometimes waste a lot of time, and if your shipment is at all complicated you need quite a bit of specialist knowledge (which is why the brokers exist).

Somewhat related to the original topic and this flight tangent, apparently fresh flowers are delivered by plane due to the combination of lightness and requirements for fast delivery. They almost act like an anti-ballast, filling up space that is otherwise unused but without adding much weight.

I worked for an oil and gas company for a very long time, and frequently saw something similar, but not quite the same.

I didn't see anyone specifically put on a plane to collect a part - but there was no need, as the field team were flying around all over the place anyway. So, a manager would accost someone going from Aberdeen to Houston, for example, and ask them to put a 10kg part in their luggage on the return journey. Then the part would get dropped off at the Aberdeen facility, and put on the next chopper to the offshore platform that needed it.

Sending human remains! I recently discovered it's cheaper to go in person with someone's ashes in your hand luggage on an international flight than to have them sent by air (actually, you can't send human remains by postal service or courier), and much easier too. I wonder whether anyone offers it as a commercial service (maybe as a side income?). It's too bad you can't take cadavers with you on flights, the cost of that is murderous.

> It's too bad you can't take cadavers with you on flights, the cost of that is murderous.

Doesn’t that just create TWO cadavers?

Fortunately looks like the growth curve is less than linear.

> you can't send human remains by postal service or courier), and much easier too. I wonder whether anyone offers it as a commercial service

Wouldn't that just be a courier then?

Happens (although less often now) in Formula 1 as well - brand new parts being sent over in a private jet, or commercial, to test and race that weekend.

I saw a guy with a dolly of fish in the ticket line at Seattle airport a couple of years ago.

My understanding is that this is routine in F1.