Master Air Waybill (MAWB)
Airline to consolidator. AWB number, issuing carrier and agent, airport of departure and destination, flight number and date, pieces, gross weight, chargeable weight, rate class, nature and quantity of goods.
Document type · Air waybills
Air waybill automation
FlowDocs reads master and house air waybills — including scans and photographs of paper originals, which are OCRed automatically — and returns the fields you named, such as AWB number, airports, flight, pieces, gross weight and chargeable weight. Forward the airline’s email and the attachment is read without anyone opening the app.
The air waybills you actually receive.
Real doc types, real fields — configured per template. No hardcoded parser per carrier.
House Air Waybill (HAWB)
Forwarder to shipper. The actual shipper and consignee, the house reference, the master it consolidates under, pieces and weights for that consignment alone.
Neutral air waybill
Issued without carrier branding. The same field set applies — nothing depends on the form’s design.
Consolidation manifest
Lists the house waybills under one master. Define a template with the house reference, pieces and weight, and each house line returns its own row.
Charges correction advice (CCA)
References the original AWB number and amends the charges. Extract the reference and the corrected values as named fields.
Photographed or scanned originals
The paper AWB, captured with a phone or a desktop scanner. No text layer to read, so FlowDocs OCRs it before extracting.
The manual work.
These are the recurring items ops teams name when we ask what takes their time on freight paperwork.
Air freight moves faster than its paperwork, so the waybill is keyed under time pressure while the shipment is already in the air.
The AWB number is an airline prefix and a serial, and one wrong character breaks tracking for everyone downstream.
Gross weight and chargeable weight sit next to each other on the form and only one of them drives the charge.
A consolidation means many house waybills under one master, all describing the same freight with different parties on each.
Airline copies arrive as scans or phone photographs of the paper original, so there is nothing to copy and paste from.
Built for air waybills
Why FlowDocs fits air paperwork.
Two weights, two fields, both named by you
Define gross_weight and chargeable_weight as separate fields and the model returns a value for each, read from where each appears on the waybill. Neither is derived from the other and neither is calculated — FlowDocs reports what the document says.
OCR is the normal path here, not the exception
FlowDocs tries the PDF’s own text layer first, and when a document yields almost no readable text it falls back to OCR automatically. For an airline copy that is a photograph of a paper original, that fallback is the whole job. Waybills sent as JPEG or PNG go straight to OCR.
Forward it from the airline’s email
Each automation is given its own address. Forward the airline’s or agent’s email to it and the attachment is read and extracted without anyone opening the app — which matters most on the document that arrives while the freight is already moving.
Master and house on separate templates
A master and a house waybill describe the same freight with different parties. Define a field template for each, and run a consolidation’s houses as one job of up to 50 documents.
Confidence beside every value
The model reports how certain it was about each field. That number is stored with the value and shown beside it in the results table. A dash means the field was not found on that waybill. Nothing is withheld on the strength of a score — every row exports either way.
CSV, Excel or your own endpoint
Export as CSV or as a real .xlsx workbook, both with a source_document and row column ahead of your own fields, or have FlowDocs POST each finished job as signed JSON to a URL you control. There is no airline or TMS connector — the import into your system stays yours.
Air waybills FAQ.
Can FlowDocs read a photographed or scanned air waybill?
Yes, and on air waybills that is the usual case. FlowDocs first tries to read the text embedded in the PDF; when a document yields almost no readable text — which is what a photograph of a paper original looks like — it automatically falls back to OCR before extracting fields. A waybill sent as a JPEG or PNG image goes straight to OCR.
Does it tell gross weight and chargeable weight apart?
They are two separate fields and you name both. The model is given your field names and asked for the value of each, read from where each appears on the waybill. FlowDocs does not calculate chargeable weight from dimensions or infer one weight from the other — it reports what the document states, and where a weight is absent the field comes back as a dash.
Does FlowDocs handle master and house air waybills?
Both. They describe the same freight with different parties, so the usual setup is one field template per type — the master naming the issuing carrier and agent, the house naming the actual shipper and consignee along with the master it consolidates under. A consolidation’s house waybills can be run together as one job of up to 50 documents.
Can I email air waybills in instead of uploading them?
Yes. Each automation is given its own address, and forwarding the airline’s or agent’s email to it means the attachment is read and extracted without anyone opening the app. One attachment per email is processed. Uploading in the app and posting to the API with a key both remain available.
What if the airline uses a different waybill layout?
The same template keeps working. FlowDocs sends the document’s text and your field names to the model and asks for a value for each, so nothing is tied to a position on a form. A neutral waybill and an airline’s branded one yield the same fields.
How do I spot a waybill that did not read cleanly?
Every extracted value carries the model’s confidence for that specific field, stored with the value and shown beside it in the results table, and a dash marks any field that was not found on the document. FlowDocs does not hold rows back or route them anywhere on the strength of a score — the extraction is there to be read and exports either way.
Can the data go straight into my airline or forwarding system?
Not directly — FlowDocs has no connector into another system and does not write to one. It gives you the data in three shapes: a CSV, a real Excel workbook, and signed JSON posted to an endpoint you control as each job finishes. The import into your own system is the step you keep.
What are the field names in the export?
Your own. If you named a field chargeable_weight, the CSV header, the Excel header and the JSON key all say chargeable_weight — in the order you defined the fields, so a template built to match the layout your system expects comes out in that layout. FlowDocs adds exactly two columns of its own ahead of yours: source_document, the original filename, and row, the line number within that document.
Send us an air waybill.
See what comes back.
No signup, no call. Send one document and we’ll return clean, structured data within a day.
You can delete or paste over the names, values and routes first — the extraction still runs on whatever is left. Use a tool that removes the text rather than a black box drawn on top: a drawn box hides it from you, not from a parser.
Send a redacted document