Even a Town of 10,000 Gets Overnight Delivery by Morning

Presque Isle, Maine, home to about 10,000 residents, still gets its overnight packages by 9 in the morning. It does not get its own jet from the center of the system, because it could never fill one. It gets them through a relay.

The relay starts the night before in Memphis. Roughly 150 aircraft arrive from around the world between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. As soon as each plane lands, workers unload it and feed its packages into an automated sorting system.

In about a quarter-hour, every parcel moves through the sort, reaches its onward loading area, and is packed into a container. Planes start taking off again at 2 a.m. and keep leaving until 4 a.m., which puts a FedEx plane on the ground almost everywhere in the United States by 6 a.m.

That still leaves the problem of towns too small for a full-size jet. The answer is smaller planes. Every morning, after the big Memphis jets reach Portland, Maine, and Manchester, New Hampshire, workers pull out the packages addressed to Presque Isle and load them onto small propeller aircraft for the hop north.

In that sense, every spoke in the network works as a kind of mini-hub. Packages move from plane, to smaller plane, to truck, and reach even a remote town on time.

Not everything passes through Memphis at all. A box sent in Phoenix bound for Seattle covers only about 1,100 miles direct, but a trip through Memphis would run to more than 3,000 miles in total and about six hours aloft. That would still arrive overnight, but it would waste fuel to carry the box roughly 1,900 needless miles. So FedEx routes that kind of shipment through a secondary hub like Oakland, which serves both cities, for a much shorter 1,300-mile trip.