Traveling Messengers

"What is it?" I asked. "The cargo, I mean."

He shrugged. "A lot of boxes. Usually it's documents, low-value samples, things like that."

He handed me the bag. "This is your sole responsibility. We'll get the boxes checked and Jupiter agents will handle customs in Tokyo and Hong Kong. You got your instruction sheet? Just follow the instructions and you'll be fine. Have a nice trip."

He turned back. "And. Don't. Get. Bumped."

Bumped? He rushed off to a van idling in the loading zone. Presumably he meant "bumped" as in from the flight. Not bumped as in, you know . . . off. Sigh. There still was much I didn't know about flying as an air courier. But so far so good. I headed for the gate.

TOKYO, 4:35 P.M. (ONE DAY LATER)

The 13-hour flight to Tokyo's Narita Airport was less than three-quarters full, and, as seasoned travelers know, the lie-down potential of three seats in coach is better than one in first class. Relatively rested after two movies, the third Harry Potter book and a seven-hour snooze, I reviewed my printed, detailed instructions as we taxied in. They involved a rendezvous with a Jupiter rep in the transit lounge. We parked, I dutifully affixed the gaudy Jupiter sticker on my lapel and was promptly stopped by a JAL agent looking for me on the ramp. She said that since my flight was late getting in and time was short for my connection, she had been dispatched to relieve me of the Jupiter pouch right here at the door of the plane.

Wow. Not only had Jupiter made every meeting, it had adjusted to a flight delay and gotten airline staff to smooth the transfer. That was it. The next segment was a "dead leg" -- no cargo at all, but I still had to be in Hong Kong to escort a load back. I made my connection, and six hours later was having a midnight lunch in Hong Kong with three days to kill before repeating the whole process in reverse. I was halfway through my $200, five-day odyssey to China and back as a bag man for . . . purveyors of low-value samples.

You remember courier flights. In college, they were right up there with drive-away car deliveries and long-haul hitchhiking as the savvy ways in which other people were seeing the world for next to nothing. Little in the mythology of cheap travel carried as much allure as the stories of "this guy I know" who got a free flight to India just for handcuffing a briefcase to his wrist and making a handoff at the Bombay airport.

Well, the stories were true. Partly. Once a upon a time, a relatively small number of people did regularly score free or nearly free flights as air couriers in the service of law firms and factories that didn't have many ways of getting their deeds, drafts and cogs around the world on short notice. (Probably no handcuffs, though.)

Today, things are a bit different. Courier travel is still around, but it has morphed into something more institutionalized, more scheduled and less free. Jaw-dropping bargains still pop up (more about that in a minute), but today, you're likely to find middling deals like Washington to London for $370 or Miami to Quito for $260. Not bad, of course, but not much better than other air discounters right now, and not nearly as good as Bombay for nothing.

"It's pretty rare to see actual free flights these days," said Bruce Causey, president of the International Association of Air Travel Couriers (IAATC), a sort of broker between courier companies and would-be couriers. "Back then, very few people knew about it, a lot of it was lastminute and a lot of it was free. But as more people found out about it and demand grew, the courier companies got greedy. They realized they didn't have to discount the ticket as much and someone would still pay it."

Here in the Travel section, we get a lot of questions about courier flights. And I had a few myself. For example, when the gate agent asks, "Did you pack your own bags today?" what do you say? "Yes, except for the 40 cartons with my name on them in the cargo hold filled with human heads for all I know"? Would I have to wrangle a thousand-pound shrink-wrapped plutonium converter onto one of those rent-a-carts and explain my own way through customs? Would I be asked to stash a balloon filled with opium anywhere on -- or in -- my person?