Fort-Worth-based American Airlines is being sued in the US District Court in Pasadena by Barcardi USA over the mysterious disappearance of more than $65,000 worth of imported French cognac last year.

The lawsuit does not automatically mean that the liquor maker is directly accusing the airline. Instead, Bacardi contends that American Airlines is accountable because the cargo was in the airline's possession, as mentioned in the lawsuit:

“While in the possession, custody and control of [American Airlines], six pallets and three cases were lost or stolen."

Bacardi in the air

Bacardi USA is the American arm of the Spanish alcohol manufacturer, having been seeling the brandy from Cognac, France, in the US over a decade ago. Additionally, the largest privately held liquor company globally has been a somewhat spontaneous partner with American Airlines and other carriers in recent years.

The liquor manufacturing owns three brands of cognac under the D’ussé Cognac, Gaston De LaGrange labels and Otard. For the American Airlines flight in question, Bacardi gave the airline 24 pallets containing 1,680 cases of cognac.

Mysterious disappearances

However, when the shipment flew from Paris and arrived at Los Angeles International Airport, it was found that six pallets and three cases were unaccounted for.

Each pallet had about 70 cases of liquor, amounting to approximately 420 cases in total that were never found. While the number of pallets and cases seems minor, those six pallets were worth no small sum.

According to Bacardi, the missing alcohol was worth up to $65,820.72. Although it was never made clear if the missing cases were lost in stolen, American Airlines has thus far paid "no part" of the bill.

A new type of business

Ever since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cargo market has been bringing in approximately $1.3 billion in revenue last year - more than double what it brought in 2019.

The lack of passengers filling up an aircraft, especially for international flights, has left more room for high-end cargo, such as liquor.

This was why American Airlines has been shifting its focus on cargo-only business to compensate for lost revenue from the pandemic - a first since 1984, according to Maulin Vakil, the airline's director of cargo customer care, at that time:

“We didn’t have a playbook. We’d never done this before. We began to explore how much cargo we could take if we couldn’t transport passengers.”

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What could have happened?

While the lawsuit did not mention the flight number, but flight in question happened in September last year.

Coincidentally, American Airlines had planned to increase its schedule to 32 cargo-only routes that totaled more than 1,000 flights in September.

The increase in cargo-only flights included daily trips from Dallas Fort Worth International Airport to international destinations such as Amsterdam, Beijing, Frankfurt, Madrid, and Paris - where the shipment from Bacardi had originated from.

Although it is almost a daily occurrence for cargo to go missing due to being mixed with mail and other types of shipments and all the moving through handoffs, to have more than 400 cases of liquor go missing in such an unnoticed fashion seems relatively unheard of.

Perhaps this is the work of an organized crime syndicate, or maybe the cases got lost and even possibly mishandled during handoffs before they were loaded onto the flight for Los Angeles. It would certainly be hard to know unless American Airlines conducts a transparent investigation.

Source: NBC News