Inside the FedEx Panda Express and the Logistics Behind It

0:01Hi, I'm Kelly Barner and this is the Art of Supply Podcast. Every business story has a supply chain angle, and those stories deserve to be told. This show digs deep into news headlines and interviews thought leaders, executives, and newsmakers to capture their perspective in their own words. With no agenda to lead us in any particular direction, we'll offer you objective coverage of geopolitics, innovation, and competition. Facts will always take precedence over hype. The rest is up to you. On Sunday, September 27th, the most tracked flight in the world, according to Flight Radar 24, wasn't carrying passengers.

0:49It was FedEx Flight FX-9756, a Boeing 777 freighter out of Chengdu, China, bound for Atlanta, Georgia. On board, well, I guess you could say there were two passengers, two giant pandas, six-year-old Ping Ping and five-year-old Fu Shuang headed to Zoo Atlanta for a 10-year stay. They and their snacks were the only cargo on the plane. Now, on the surface, this is a feel-good story. Chinese President Xi Jinping called the pair, quote, an envoy of friendship between China and the United States. And CBS News reported the pandas were one of the few concrete outcomes of his three-day state visit to Washington.

1:31But underneath this cute photo op is a serious multimodal logistics operation, one that started months before anyone saw a panda on a plane, and one that had to move people and paperwork right alongside the bears. In this episode of Art of Supply, I'll cover the federal paper trail that had to be in place before two bears could legally cross the globe. What it takes to move live cargo door to door by truck, plane, forklift, and truck without stressing that cargo out. And the people who traveled with the pandas as well as the ones who got to Atlanta first. Now, before anybody booked a plane or put any cute pictures on it, someone had to file all the paperwork.

2:17And there's a little bit of background here on why pandas need so much paperwork. work. Internationally, giant pandas were reclassified from endangered to vulnerable in 2016 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN. However, under U.S. law, giant pandas are still listed as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act. Now, that act prohibits certain activities with listed species, including importing them unless a federal permit is issued. So it requires the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to invite public comment before they can issue that permit. Now, these pandas are not a gift.

3:01China claims or maintains ownership of all of the world's pandas and leases them to foreign zoos. Any cubs born abroad remain Chinese property. Their standard terms are a 10-year lease and a fee of up to$1 million per year. Since 1998, following a World Wildlife Fund lawsuit, U.S. Fish and Wildlife only allows a zoo to import a panda if more than half the loan fee goes to conservation of wild pandas. So the conservation case and varying international classification of the species are part of the shipping requirements. Now, on April 23rd of this year, U.S. Fish and Wildlife published notice of Zoo Atlanta's permit application in the Federal Register.

3:48They asked for a permit, quote, to import one male and one female captive bred giant panda from the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in Szechuan for the purpose of enhancing the propagation or survival of the species. Now that same month, Zoo Atlanta and Child Wildlife Conservation Association announced a new international cooperative research agreement. And they named Ping Ping and Fu Shuang as the pandas that would be coming to Atlanta. The public comment period closed on May 26th. And how many comments did this gather? Three. So as of now, the date the permit was issued hasn't been published.

4:30The most recent Fish and Wildlife issuance notice from August 11th still doesn't list it. But that kind of lead time is expected when your shipment is alive. Rachel Watkins Rogers is the Registrar and Records Coordinator at Zoo Miami. She told FreightWaves that transporting an animal can take a year or more depending on permits, and it can involve veterinarians, shipping coordinators, trainers, and supervisors. As she put it, until everything is done in the correct order, you can't move forward. And getting that order wrong can be expensive. When permit delays hit an elephant move from Australia's Melbourne Zoo, the cargo flight had to be scheduled at a loss of over$500 ,000.

5:19So now for the physical logistics, this all started a month before takeoff. Both pandas spent a month in quarantine in Chengdu before the move. They used that time to get them used to their crates and used to the loud noises they might experience en route. When ABC News Brit Planet got inside that quarantine facility, she had to put on full PPE just to protect the pandas and not break their quarantine. Crate training follows a very specific routine, according to FedEx. Pandas walk through the crate daily, then they spend short periods of time inside with the doors closed. The crates are made of both steel and plexiglass, and they have removable side panels so that keepers and vets can see the pandas and interact with them during the flight.

6:08Now, on past Panda Express flights, those steel crates have weighed around 800 pounds each. Even after the plane is ready to have the cargo, its outside needs a little bit of work. FedEx's pan delivery or branding goes on both sides of the aircraft and it takes four days to apply. For zoo animals, air is the preferred mode of travel. It's the quickest and it's the most humane way to ship them because they ultimately have to spend less time confined to a crate. The stress that they could be under matters a lot. A stressed animal's core body temperature can rise significantly, putting it in danger and potentially turning an envoy of friendship into a PR nightmare.

6:55Then comes the move itself, and this was a three-leg journey. Leg one is a truck ride out of the breeding base. On September 26th, vehicles carrying Ping Ping and Fushuong left the Chengdu research base of giant panda breeding, and they moved at night. Even so, people lined the road to see them off on their journey. Leg 2 is that flight, and this is where the 777 freighter earns its keep. On board with the pandas were fresh bamboo, water, and treats, and Simple Flying reported that the menu included steamed corn buns, bamboo shoots, and carrots. Flight FX-9756 left Chengdu International Airport around 2.55 a.m.

7:42local time and landed at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport around 6.50 a.m. their own local time. Now, that's nearly 8 ,000 miles and roughly 16 hours of nonstop flying. And it raises a fair question. How does a freighter fly that far without stopping to refuel? Now, Boeing lists the 777's range at about 5 ,000 nautical miles, but that assumes a full payload of over 100 tons. With only two pandas, their crates, snacks, and a small team on board, that freighter can fly considerably farther. Although it's not a given on every Panda flight, and conditions do change. FedEx's 2023 flight from Washington-Dulles to Chengdu did have to make a fuel stop in Anchorage, Alaska.

8:32A nearly empty wide-body freighter on a trans-Pacific lane also has costs beyond fuel. In its analysis, Retail News Asia notes that live animal charters need dedicated aircraft, temperature-controlled main deck space, and direct routings that skip the usual trend shipment hubs. They also point out that these flights pull main deck capacity out of commercial rotation on high-demand export lanes out of western China, where Chengdu is also a major air cargo gateway for electronics and industrial goods. So in a way, pausing everything to move the pandas would have had an impact on business shipments as well.

9:16Now, FedEx has generously donated the full transportation cost, but it seems like they've gotten their money's worth out of the feel-good publicity associated with the trip. Now, the final leg of the trip brings us back to trucking. Speed on the ground matters as much as it does in the air. Mystic Aquarium told Freight Waves that on FedEx flights, animals are the first on the plane and the first off, and they're loaded into the trucks right away. CNN's team at the Atlanta airport watched two large crates lowered from the cargo door, each into its own FedEx truck. With a police escort, those trucks made the 10-mile drive to the zoo where a forklift lifted the crates off.

9:59And from there, the pandas went straight into a biosecure area of the zoo's new giant panda complex for a routine quarantine of about a month. So the pandas spent about a month in quarantine on each end of a 16-hour flight. Of course, they didn't make the journey alone. Sam Rivera, Zoo Atlanta's vice president of animal health and a veterinarian, flew with them. As he told ABC News, I want to make sure that they stay calm, that they're healthy through the whole trip. But experienced Zoo Atlanta keepers were also sent to China to accompany the pandas. For the Chengdu keepers, it was what had to be a really hard handoff.

10:42They had cared for Pingping and Fuxuang for six years. And there's a nice bit of symmetry in who was on that plane. When Atlanta's previous pandas went home in 2024, Vice President of Animal Health Sam Rivera flew to China with them to see them home. So the same vet who saw Atlanta's last pandas out of the country was there to bring the new ones in. And there were also people on site who got to Atlanta before the pandas did to make sure everything was ready. Raymond B. King, Zoo Atlanta's president and CEO, said several Chinese colleagues came ahead of the pandas to make sure the transformed habitat met the appropriate standards.

11:22They will likely stay for a few months just to make sure that the pandas transition okay. According to Xinhua, as reported by CNN, China arranged for several veterinarians and breeders to stay in Atlanta through the entire quarantine window. And the two teams held many online and in-person meetings on the plan just to make sure that the panda habitat was upgraded as much as it needed to be. That habitat, now called the Arthur M. Blank Panda Grove, went through a$6 million renovation funded by Robert W. Woodruff Foundation. and it includes new climbing structures and pools. Now, in other words, the receiving dock, in a way, had to pass inspection before the shipment could even leave its point of origin.

12:09Now, on the carrier side, Simple Flying reports that planning each Panda flight involved more than 80 FedEx team members around the world. For the 2023 flight out of Washington, FedEx said that their team collaborated weekly for three months. And as a reminder, they donate that effort every time. Zoo Atlanta president Raymond King described the whole process as smooth and friendly, with pandas being the one thing everybody agrees on. In his words, it was just, quote, a matter of working through the details in the process, which is a very modest way to describe five months of logistics details.

12:51Now, just to sum up what went into this enormously cute photo op and the following 10-year window. The legal paperwork came first. A federal endangered species permit, a public comment period, and a lease with conservation strings attached. The physical move involved a truck, a plane, another truck, with a month of crate training on one end and a month of quarantine on the other. and that freighter moved people as well as pandas, a Zoo Atlanta vet, keepers from both countries, and Chinese experts who checked the destination before the cargo ever shipped. The bottom line is that this story is a test case for what door-to-door logistics looks like when the cargo can't be replaced and can't be rushed.

13:38Ping Ping and Fu Shuang will make their public debut on November 6th in the new Arthur M. Blank Panda Grove. Now, if you're listening to this episode when it first comes out, that's just a week away. And at some point, Fish and Wildlife will publish the notice that it issued Zoo Atlanta's permit, the last line in a paper trail that went public back in April. What most people will see are two pandas eating bamboo. But what it took to get them there was a permit, a lease, a month in a crate, a dedicated freighter, two trucks, a forklift, a police escort, and a team that straddles the Pacific. 16 hours in the air, five months on paper.

14:20This is yet another amazing example of what supply chain and logistics professionals can do.

14:31Art of Supply is part of the Art of Procurement family of brands. To ensure you never miss new content, I invite you to sign up for our newsletter at artofsupply.com. If this episode of the Art of Supply podcast made you think, please spread the word. You can support the show by giving us a thumbs up, a star rating, or a review wherever you find your podcast audio. Join me next week for another deep dive into the art of supply. Thank you.