IN Brief:
- IATA says around 80% of dangerous-goods incidents reported in early 2025 involved undeclared or hidden goods.
- Lithium batteries, e-cigarettes, and aerosols were among the concealed commodities most frequently identified.
- The proposed response spreads responsibility across regulators, manufacturers, marketplaces, shippers, forwarders, airlines, handlers, and airports.
IATA is calling for stronger dangerous goods controls earlier in the air cargo chain, arguing that aviation security screening cannot provide a complete defence against hazardous shipments that enter the system undeclared or incorrectly declared.
The airline association is proposing a multi-layered approach spanning regulators, manufacturers, online marketplaces, shippers, freight forwarders, postal operators, airlines, ground handlers, and airports. Its position is that responsibility has to begin before cargo reaches the airport rather than relying on screening close to the point of loading.
IATA says around 80% of dangerous goods incidents reported to it during the first half of 2025 involved undeclared or hidden dangerous goods. Lithium batteries were among the products most commonly identified, alongside concealed e-cigarettes, aerosols, and other hazardous commodities.
The distinction between dangerous goods controls and aviation security screening sits at the centre of the proposal. Existing cargo security systems were designed primarily to identify explosives and other security threats, not to classify the full range of hazardous goods that may move through freight and parcel networks.
That limitation becomes more serious when shipment information is already wrong before a package reaches an airport. Screening can sometimes reveal suspicious contents, but it cannot reliably reconstruct product information that a manufacturer, seller, marketplace, shipper, or intermediary failed to declare correctly earlier in the process.
IATA is therefore asking governments to strengthen oversight and enforcement of dangerous goods requirements across the cargo chain. Manufacturers and online marketplaces are being urged to ensure that hazardous products are correctly identified and certified where necessary, with accurate product information passed to the organisations responsible for transport.
Shippers, freight forwarders, and postal operators sit at the next layer. IATA wants stronger training and acceptance controls, alongside better use of customer and shipment data to identify higher-risk cargo before it reaches the airport. Airlines and ground handlers would then add pre-loading checks, while airports improve coordination and information sharing across the cargo community.
The model treats dangerous goods compliance as an information problem as much as a physical screening problem. Once an incorrectly described item enters a logistics network, each downstream participant is working with data inherited from the previous stage. Weak information at origin therefore shifts the detection burden onto organisations with less knowledge of what the product actually contains.
Lithium batteries illustrate the difficulty. They are embedded across consumer, industrial, medical, and communications products, while batteries may also move separately or alongside equipment. The transport requirements depend on what is being shipped and how it is prepared, so a vague or incorrect description can prevent the correct acceptance process from being applied.
The growth of online marketplaces and parcel traffic adds another challenge because the party tendering a shipment may be several steps removed from the original manufacturer. Product data, seller declarations, platform controls, and carrier acceptance processes have to align if hazardous contents are to be identified before the parcel enters an air cargo stream.
Moving controls upstream spreads responsibility across businesses that do not all share the same systems, regulatory exposure, or commercial relationships. A manufacturer may hold the most accurate technical information, a marketplace may know the seller and transaction, a forwarder may see customer history and routing data, and an airline may control the final acceptance decision before loading.
The approach therefore depends on those layers reinforcing one another rather than assuming that a single checkpoint will catch every error. Better product identification reduces the number of problem shipments entering the network, while customer and shipment data can help intermediaries focus additional scrutiny where inconsistencies or unusual patterns appear.
Airport screening remains part of the defence, but IATA is explicitly resisting the idea that it should become the primary answer to undeclared dangerous goods. By the time an unidentified hazardous item reaches an aircraft loading area, several earlier opportunities to classify, document, reject, or correct the shipment have already passed.
IATA represents more than 370 airlines accounting for about 85% of global air traffic, giving the proposal broad operational relevance even though implementation ultimately depends on regulators and companies across the cargo chain. The association’s white paper places enforcement, product data, acceptance controls, pre-loading checks, and airport coordination within the same risk-management framework.
That framework shifts attention towards the point where information is created. Dangerous goods are routinely transported by air under established rules; the larger risk comes from cargo that bypasses those rules because its contents were hidden, omitted, or described incorrectly. Preventing that failure earlier reduces the reliance on downstream operators to identify a problem after the shipment is already moving.
