U.S. Customs and Border Protection will end a legacy process known as 'Flying Trucks' on November 24. The process allowed participating express carriers to use air-manifest procedures for certain cargo that physically arrived in the United States by truck. CBP announced a 90-day transition in an August 26 Cargo Systems Messaging Service notice.
CBP says the process began as a truck eManifest and Multi-Modal Manifest test in the mid-to-late 2000s and was intended to sunset in 2009. The agency now says using an air manifest for cargo arriving by truck does not satisfy the current modality requirement in 19 CFR 123.92. Its notice rescinds prior operational support while allowing the transition through November 24.
The scope is important. This is a cutover for express carriers and stakeholders that still use the Flying Trucks process. It does not create a second November deadline for carriers already filing cargo that arrives by truck through the standard truck advance electronic manifest workflow.
Section 123.92 generally requires advance electronic cargo information for an incoming truck 30 minutes or one hour before arrival at the first U.S. port, depending on the approved system used. The required record covers the conveyance and equipment, carrier, trip and shipment identifiers, container and seal information, quantity and weight, cargo description, hazardous-material details when applicable, and shipper and consignee information, subject to the rule's definitions and exceptions.
The regulation also divides filing responsibility. An approved importer or customs broker may transmit certain shipment information, but the arriving carrier remains responsible for presenting the rest of the required truck cargo information. That makes a successful technical mode change only part of the cutover; the handoff between carrier, express operator, broker and customer also has to remain complete.
FreightNews infers that affected operators should test the production path as a truck arrival before the final week. Useful cases include the transport-mode code, carrier and trip identifiers, house and master references, conveyance and container records, seals, weight, precise cargo description, party data, hazardous-material fields, corrections, rejects and arrival-timing controls. A passing air-manifest workflow is not evidence that the truck submission will pass.
Teams should assign an owner for each rejected or mismatched record and preserve the accepted response, correction history and cutoff timestamp. A cutover calendar can include customer-file conversion, broker and carrier certification, port-specific exception contacts, after-hours escalation and a fallback for cargo tendered with stale air-mode instructions. CBP directs stakeholders to their client representative or port of entry with operational questions.
This transition is separate from other current CBP initiatives. The September inquiry into foreign export documents is only an advance rulemaking notice, and the agency's recent rail export-manifest action follows a different timetable. Flying Trucks is a defined, current truck-arrival modality cleanup with a November 24 end date. The practical question is whether every affected express shipment can enter the standard truck manifest path before that date.