Competing to Provide the Final Flight Home : Airlines: For some carriers, corpse shipments account for up to 5% of cargo revenue.

We are a mobile society. According to the Census Bureau, two out of five Americans change their residence every five years. We often die a long way from our birthplace. Yet, we eventually want to go back to our native soil for our eternal rest.

“People are like elephants,” said Marion Kordich, customer relations manager for cargo at Northwest Airlines. “They migrate, but they want to go home when they die.”

It’s a phenomenon that’s of more than mild interest to Northwest and other airlines. The shipment of what they refer to as “human remains” is big business, especially for carriers serving Sun Belt locations. For some, human body shipments account for as much as 5% of total annual cargo revenue, industry sources say.

The business is so important to the carriers that they vie for it intensely. One airline has instituted a type of frequent-flier program to get corpse business from funeral directors. Several have established special phone hot-line numbers to handle arrangements. Some offer unrestricted low fares to relatives accompanying bodies of loved ones. And one group of funeral directors pilots their own planes, transporting the deceased themselves.

It’s also cargo that is treated with extraordinary care. Human remains bump all other cargo except passenger baggage; every effort is made to use nonstop flights. Most bodies are embalmed before flight. But to accommodate those whose religion does not permit embalming, such as Orthodox Jews, the airlines will transport the deceased in a shipping container packed with dry ice.

No other cargo can be placed on top of the special containers carrying bodies and their caskets. Human remains also are off-loaded first at the cargo ramp and taken immediately to warehouses where they are picked up by the receiving funeral home.

“The shipment of human remains is a business which we consider very sensitive,” said Jon Bumbaugh, director of Continental Airlines’ mortuary services division. “We treat it very carefully.”

“People have to have empathy for this kind of cargo,” said Pat Henke, research director of the Funeral Home Public Service Group International, an industry trade group based in Charlotte, N.C. “Human remains cannot be handled like a case of Pepsi.”

The sensitivity is understandable. The airlines know there is strong demand for such services--so strong is the urge to go home when people die.

An example of the American penchant to be moved back home is what has happened in the community of Reston, Va., population 58,000. Built from scratch in 1964 as a suburb of Washington, it has no cemetery.

“Hardly anyone was born there,” said William Jackman of the Air Transport Assn., an airline trade group and Reston resident. “Everyone is shipped out when they die.”

Delta Air Lines, thanks to its preponderance of flights to and from Florida--where many old people retire--controls about a third of the market, carrying 35,000 of the 90,000 bodies shipped annually by U.S. carriers. At American Airlines, shipping human remains accounts for between 2% and 3% of its total cargo revenue, or between $7 million and $10 million annually, said David I. Beatson, the line’s managing director of cargo sales and marketing.

And there is a certain amount of seasonality. Continental’s Bumbaugh said business picks up dramatically in the winter months. “It’s not that the mortality rate is any higher in the winter,” he said. “It is just that more people are away from home at that time.”

Carriers mostly use a soft-sell approach to lure business.

“We don’t push it,” said Larry Doak, USAir’s director of cargo sales. “We make it known to the funeral directors that it (the service) is available. This is business of a sensitive nature.”

But some marketing ploys are less subtle. Continental Airlines a few years ago instituted a program--dubbed facetiously the “frequent-dier program”--that gives funeral directors one point for every dollar spent on human remains business. For 20,000 points, the airline awards a round-trip transcontinental airline ticket.

Eastern, Continental’s sister airline, also had a similar program but dropped it recently. “The families were criticizing the funeral directors for receiving benefits from a service they (the families) were paying for,” said Ron J. Hoag, Eastern’s director of commercial cargo sales.

Some airlines also offer special bereavement fares for relatives accompanying a loved one on the final journey, with discounts as much as 40% to 60% off conventional fares. At United Airlines, about 10% of the 190 bodies it ships per week are accompanied by relatives, said Catherine Miggins, the carrier’s manager of cargo sales and service center. The airlines also have special bereavement fares for people traveling to funerals.

Most shipments are arranged by funeral directors, one at the place of death and the other at the burial destination. Human remains shipments can often be seen late in the day at major airports when lines of hearses--arranged by funeral directors--arrive at air cargo terminals to pick up their unique freight.

To cater to these funeral directors, some airlines have instituted special 800 numbers, with staffers assigned to handle calls around-the-clock from funeral directors or relatives.

Delta calls its 800 mortuary service “Delta Cares”; its phone number is 800 DL CARES.

None of this comes cheap, however.

The cost of shipping a body is basically about the same as a discount coach ticket, averaging $300.

“It’s really a big business for the airlines, but it is costly,” said Edward Murphy, editor of Casket and Sunnyside Magazine. “The airlines have to spend more money than on regular cargo. For instance, the special accommodations require extra manpower and specially trained reservations agents, adding to the payroll.”

Until very recently, the airlines used to charge for the shipment of human remains by weight. But customers complained that this practice punished families who purchased heavy caskets. Moreover, funeral directors were unable to inform customers of total charges of the entire funeral until after the completion of the journey.

Now the carriers have zoned the country; the more zones, the higher the fare. American Airlines charges $425 for a body shipment from New York to Los Angeles and $600 from Los Angeles to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Continental charges $247 from Miami to New York and $441 from Los Angeles to New York.

But many smaller communities no longer get any service from major airlines, and few of the commuter aircraft serving these small cities have space for coffins.

As a result, funeral homes often must send a hearse for trips in which they can’t get commercial airline service. Such hearse transport services make sense for short distances. But on trips of as much as 600 miles, it’s not cost effective, said Gray Budelman, president of Mortuary Services of New Jersey, one of the nation’s largest human remains shippers.

“You don’t want to put a man and a vehicle on the road for that many hours,” said Budelman. “It’s too short a distance for commercial airlines and too long for a car.”

As a result, a group of funeral directors who are also pilots has banded together to form an organization called the Flying Funeral Directors of America. But they charge considerably more than commercial airlines: about $175 an hour.

And the flights don’t always go smoothly. Richard A. Santore, executive director of the Associated Funeral Directors Service International in St. Petersburg, Fla., who doubles as a pilot, last Thanksgiving flew a woman’s body from New Jersey to the Midwest. Wind shear caused the plane to crash, injuring Santore. But the coffin was undamaged. After the accident, the deceased woman’s husband told Santore, “She didn’t like to fly anyway.”