FLIGHT DATE ON AIR WAYBILL

My bike at Red Beach, Da Nang

QUESTION

Dear Mr. Old Man,

I was very excited to find your blog the other day as I have been looking for a good resource to help develop my Letters of Credit skills. I have just been promoted from a manufacturing employee to a position coordinating all letters of credit for my company and so I have a lot to learn!

We received an LC specifying required Air Waybill ‘showing the flight date and the flight number’. Upon presentment the bank responded:

‘We observed the following discrepancies:  AIRWAY BILL MISS TO SHOW FLIGHT NUMBER AND DATE’

Upon further clarification the bank wants ‘to see the date in the date column’. They think the 23 is part of the flight number. I have informed them that the AWB clearly shows a flight# / Date format yet they insist that I send a corrected AWB.

Will you please let me know who is right and if there is a relevant rule in the UCP 600?

I sincerely appreciate your assistance and any lessons you can give!

Best Regards and Thanks,

Andrew Thomsen

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ANSWER

Dear Andrew,

Any document required to be presented under LC must comply with (i) the relevant articles of UCP 600 and (ii) the terms and conditions of the LC.

The LC requires AWB to indicate flight number and date, then AWB presented must indicate the same to comply with the terms and conditions of the LC.

Whether EK230/23 includes flight date?

It appears the AWB in question does not appear to indicate flight date as required by the LC. A date would include day, month, year. In addition, EK230/23 appears in the box for flight number information only.

HOWEVER, it is common practice in transport industry to indicate flight dates by reference to a day only, rather than showing the day and the month of dispatch. Therefore, it would be reasonable for the document examiner to read the flight date EK230/23 in conjunction with other date information indicated on other presented documents.

For your information that may be used to support your view, I quote herewith an excerpt from ICC Opinion TA767rev regarding the transport industry’s practice of indicating flight date on AWB:

QUOTE

The insurance policy indicated “AWB dated 2011-06-17” and “Place and date of issue Stockholm 2011-06-17”. Whilst it is common practice in the transport industry to indicate flight dates by reference to a day only, rather than showing the day and the month of dispatch, a document examiner would look for data on the photocopy of an air waybill that would provide an indication of the applicable month. In this respect, it would be reasonable for a document examiner to read the flight date “QR688/17” in conjunction with other date information indicated on the insurance policy (e.g., AWB dated 2011-06-17) and determine the month as June.

UNQUOTE

Please provide the bank with the above quoted information in order for them to re-consider.

Kind regards,

Mr. Old Man

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ANDREW THOMSEN

Dear Old Man,

Thank you very much for your fast response. I really appreciated the detail you went into and the citation you provided. I didn’t know that there was another resource beyond the UCP 600 and the ISBP and have requested a copy of the opinions for future reference.

After a lengthy discussion with the bank they agreed to accept the AWBs (there were two presentments like this) this time only. In the future they want the flight#/date specified EK230/22OCT14 but I am very happy to not have to send new AWBs all the way to Bahrain.

I look forward to learning more from you in the future.

Best Regards,

Andrew Thomsen