Up in the air

Did you know that one of the main ways of making sure we meet our customers’ expectations is flying our mail to parts of the UK?

We use seven main airport hubs and seven operating in our smaller island communities, running 38 flights overnight from Monday to Friday, and a further 12 on Saturdays. This amounts to moving around 1.8 million items each night.

Martin Dagless, head of air, rail and sea operations, said: ‘Working with our two suppliers, Loganair and Atlantic Airlines, we manage a very complex operation to make sure some of our biggest commercial customers are delivering First Class and Special Delivery items to and from Scotland, Northern Ireland and our more remote communities in the Highlands and Islands, Channel Islands, Orkneys, Shetlands and the Isle of Man.

‘All mail is security screened and sealed before making it on to the planes. As you can imagine some of the areas we get to can suffer from extreme weather conditions, but even with those challenges we still deliver a much quicker service by using planes, helping us to maintain our quality of service and reaching all parts of the UK.’

The Royal Mail cruciform will soon be visible on both our partner airlines’ planes.