• The Chicago Convention and associated Freedoms of the Air, particularly the Fifth Freedom, remain central to modern airfreight, enabling multi-leg routes that optimise payloads, reduce empty backhauls, and support high-value intercontinental trade flows.
• Fifth Freedom rights serve as both an economic tool and diplomatic lever, with liberal jurisdictions promoting them to enhance connectivity, while others limit access to protect domestic carriers, affecting trade patterns and competitive dynamics.
• Maximising their value requires streamlined approvals, robust transhipment infrastructure, and alignment with sustainability goals, ensuring that network efficiencies support growing global cargo demand while meeting environmental and regulatory standards.

Eighty years after its signing, the 1944 Convention on International Civil Aviation, known as the Chicago Convention, continues to underpin the governance of international air transport. Created in the final phase of the Second World War to restore order to civil aviation, it established a core principle: every state exercises full sovereignty over its airspace. Yet, to make international aviation viable, states also needed to grant limited operating rights to one another. This balance between sovereignty and mobility produced the “Freedoms of the Air”, which remain central to commercial aviation.

As airfreight becomes increasingly important to global trade, these same freedoms now influence which cities rise as logistics hubs, which airlines expand, and how supply chains are structured. Recent examples, including China Eastern Airlines’ Fifth-Freedom service linking China to Budapest via Riyadh, highlight how these rights operate in practice and why they matter to the next phase of airfreight growth.

Chicago’s enduring architecture

Signed by 52 nations in 1944 and now comprising 193 contracting states, the Convention established a regime that combines national sovereignty with structured cooperation under the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Two core instruments emerged:

• the Convention itself, which established ICAO and set regulatory standards; and

• the International Air Services Transit Agreement (IASTA), which created the First and Second Freedoms—the right to overfly and to make technical stops.

The commercial freedoms, including the Third, Fourth, and Fifth, were left to bilateral agreements. These determine whether an airline may carry revenue traffic between foreign states. Passenger airlines have generally used them sparingly, but cargo carriers have converted them into strategic assets.

The significance of the Fifth Freedom

The Fifth Freedom—the right for an airline to carry traffic between two foreign countries on a service that originates or ends in its home country—has become fundamental for cargo networks. It enables carriers to blend markets, improve aircraft utilisation, and create commercially viable long-haul routings.

A carrier operating a Shanghai–Riyadh–Budapest rotation, for example, can move Chinese exports to the Middle East before transporting Middle Eastern shipments to Europe. This maximises payloads, reduces empty backhauls, and forms new trade corridors not served by direct home-country flights.

IATA’s 2024 Air Cargo Market Analysis shows global demand rising 10.6 percent year-on-year, driven primarily by intercontinental flows. Multi-leg routings—many enabled by Fifth-Freedom permissions—account for a growing share of capacity, particularly between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Sectors such as pharmaceuticals, electronics, and perishables rely heavily on these routings, where delays of even one day risk undermining product value.

Economic tool and diplomatic lever

Despite strong commercial logic, Fifth Freedom rights remain politically sensitive. States evaluate traffic rights through the lens of national interest, balancing trade facilitation with the protection of domestic airlines. Air-service agreements govern these decisions, defining capacity, routes, designated carriers, and the scope of permitted freedoms.

In practice, Fifth Freedom operations require agreement from three states: the airline’s home country, the intermediate stop, and the final destination. Liberal jurisdictions such as Singapore, the UAE, and the Netherlands promote these rights to strengthen trade and logistics connectivity. Others, such as India and China, grant them selectively to safeguard national carriers.

As ICAO observes, these permissions function as “instruments of economic diplomacy”, requiring states to weigh sovereignty against broader connectivity gains.

Network economics and competitive models

Fifth Freedom rights reshape the economics of freighter deployment by enabling multi-point routing that balances demand across multiple legs. Aircraft such as the Boeing 777F and Airbus A350F operate more efficiently when integrated into circuits linking Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

This model parallels the development of Sixth Freedom hub operations, such as those in the Gulf region, where carriers consolidate traffic from numerous origins and redistribute it globally. The “networkisation” of air logistics—connecting manufacturing centres, consumption markets, and transhipment hubs—is built on the flexibility provided by these freedoms.

Policy priorities for airfreight

To modernise the system without altering the Convention’s structure, three policy priorities stand out:

Streamlining traffic-rights approvals

Fifth Freedom applications often face administrative delays. Standardised approval processes would improve responsiveness in a sector that moves nearly 35 percent of global trade by value.

Enhancing transhipment infrastructure

Liberal rights must be matched by adequate physical capability. Airports such as Dubai’s DWC, Singapore’s Changi Airfreight Centre, and Luxembourg Findel Airport demonstrate the value of integrating cold chain, bonded logistics, and digital customs systems.

Aligning with sustainability mandates

Under ICAO’s CORSIA and IATA’s Net Zero 2050 roadmap, growth in Fifth-Freedom operations must align with sustainable aviation fuel uptake and operational efficiencies.

Competition, protectionism, and the road ahead

While Fifth Freedom rights enhance efficiency, they also trigger competitive concerns. The European Union incorporates fair-competition provisions in agreements to prevent market distortion, while the United States grants open-skies rights selectively. Developing economies must balance liberalisation with domestic industry growth. India’s restrictive Fifth-Freedom policies, for example, have limited transhipment potential at major airports despite national ambitions for cargo expansion.

As airfreight becomes integral to global economic infrastructure, the principles set out in 1944 remain relevant. Yet uneven liberalisation and infrastructure disparities risk fragmenting the global cargo network. The future lies not in rewriting the Convention, but in harmonised, data-driven frameworks reflecting twenty-first-century trade realities.

The Fifth Freedom, once an abstract diplomatic concept, has become a competitive differentiator and a catalyst for supply chain resilience—making freedom of the air increasingly synonymous with freedom to trade.