The Case of the Leaking Package
By Julia Casciaro
I was working in logistics operations for an NFO—Next Flight Out company—when my phone rang. It was an air courier calling from the airport.
“There’s a box here at the airport leaking,” they told me casually.
I called the customer who had shipped the package. “We have one of your shipments here, and it’s reported that it’s leaking.” And they responded with, “Oh my God, you’re handling one of our lungs.”
My stomach dropped. A human lung. Leaking.
“What do you want us to do with it?” I asked, my voice shaking slightly.
The customer’s response sent me into full panic mode. “This is a contaminated lung. You need to shut down the airport and call in the CDC, and we need to make sure this doesn’t hit the media. This is going to devastate us. We need to get management involved as soon as possible.”
“We were sending three lungs with you today,” they explained. Suddenly, we were dealing with three possible scenarios:
One: It could be a lung for a patient already prepped and waiting on an operating table. Two: It could be an infectious lung going for research that was contaminated. Three: It could be a non-contaminated lung going for research.
I hung up the phone and realized I was physically shaking.
Just as I was about to escalate this to every level of management and probably several government agencies, the customer called back with an update.
Getting this information was painfully slow and clunky. I had to call the dispatcher, who had to call the driver. The driver had to check which shipment he had on board, then call the dispatcher back, who then had to call customer service, who finally called me. In a situation where minutes matter, this chain of communication felt like it took years.
We eventually got lucky—the crushed box was the lung going for research, not a contaminated one or one meant for transplant. But it was still a devastating loss.
We later found out what happened. The driver had put the box on the roof of his car while loading other packages, then driven away. The box slid down the back of the car, fell onto the road, and someone ran over it.
Of course, we fired the driver immediately. But that doesn’t change the fact that we lost something priceless. Somebody had donated their lung for research. You can’t put a price tag on that kind of gift.
My customer still had to notify the recipients explaining that their lung ended up crashed on a highway because of our carelessness—that’s a conversation I never want to have again.
If we’d had better tracking, we could have immediately identified exactly which package it was. We could have known exactly where and when the incident happened. We could have responded faster and with the appropriate level of urgency.
Instead, we had to piece together what happened through a game of telephone while I contemplated whether I needed to call the CDC and shut down an entire airport.
The unpredictable nature of logistics means one moment you’re handling routine cargo, the next—life-saving organs. In these critical moments, real-time visibility isn’t optional—it’s essential.
A single mistake can cost not just money but lives and opportunities. That’s why leading logistics teams are moving beyond basic tracking to embrace advanced monitoring, predictive alerts, and AI-powered decision-making.
Because when the stakes are high, you shouldn’t be scrambling for answers—you should already have them.
