An air waybill is the contract that moves cargo by air, and Docyield's parser lifts its key fields off the form — the AWB number, the issuing carrier, the shipper and consignee, the origin and destination airports, the date, the piece count and gross weight, the nature of the goods, and the total charges. Upload an AWB as a PDF or a photo and you get JSON, CSV, or Excel back in seconds, instead of decoding the eleven-digit number and airline prefix by hand.
The AWB is air freight's equivalent of a bill of lading, with one crucial difference: it is a contract of carriage and a receipt, but it is not a document of title, so cargo is released to the named consignee rather than against a surrendered original. Docyield reads the IATA-style layout and keeps the airport codes, the weight, and the charges in their own fields, so an AWB from any airline or forwarder lands as consistent structured data.
What an air waybill is and where it fits
An air waybill (AWB) is issued by an airline or its agent when cargo is accepted for air transport. It identifies the carrier through its three-digit airline prefix, carries a unique serial number, names the shipper and consignee, states the airports of departure and destination, and describes the consignment by piece count, weight, and nature of goods. The charges box totals what is owed for the carriage. A master AWB covers a consolidation between carriers; house AWBs cover the individual shipments inside it.
In the air-cargo flow, the AWB is created at booking and acceptance, travels with the consignment, and is referenced at every handoff — origin handling, the flight, transit, and final delivery. Forwarders track shipments by the AWB number, customs reference it on entry, and the consignee uses it to collect the cargo. Capturing that data accurately is what keeps a time-sensitive air shipment from stalling at a handling agent.
Why structured extraction beats manual keying
AWB numbers are formatted as a three-digit prefix and an eight-digit serial, and they are easy to misread or transpose — a single wrong digit breaks a tracking lookup or a customs match. Teams that rekey AWB details into a forwarding system or a manifest spend real time on it and introduce errors. Extracting the fields structurally captures the number, airports, weight, and charges in one read with no retyping.
OCR on its own returns the characters but not the meaning, leaving you to work out which code is the origin airport and which the destination, and to separate the gross weight from the charges. Docyield interprets the form and returns named fields, so a downstream system can rely on 'destinationAirport' and 'chargesTotal' meaning the same thing across every airline's AWB you process.
Who uses an air waybill parser
- Air freight forwarders capturing AWB data into their forwarding or TMS systems.
- Customs brokers pulling shipper, consignee, and goods detail for air-cargo entries.
- Importers and exporters tracking air shipments and reconciling charges.
- Ground-handling and warehouse teams logging inbound air consignments.
- Finance teams checking air-freight charges against quoted rates.
- Logistics platforms adding AWB capture through the Docyield API.
Accuracy, blanks, and review
We make no claim of perfect extraction, and the AWB number is a good reminder why — a string of digits leaves no room for a confident guess. Docyield is built to be accurate on clear documents and honest about the rest. When a field such as the nature of goods or the charges total is genuinely absent, it returns empty rather than a fabricated value, because a wrong number on a freight document costs more to unwind than a known blank.
Scan quality drives the result, especially for the AWB number and weight figures, which sit in dense boxes. A clean PDF reads well; a faxed or photographed copy with handling stamps over the data is harder. For documents that come through poorly, the source sits beside the extracted fields so a quick check can confirm the eleven-digit number digit by digit before it flows into a system.
Airports, weight, pieces, and charges
Docyield pulls the origin and destination as airport codes or names into their own fields, so a route reads cleanly whether the form shows IATA codes or full airport names. The piece count and gross weight come back separately — pieces as a number, weight with its unit preserved — which keeps a consignment's physical detail intact for handling and manifest purposes.
The charges total is captured as its own numeric field, distinct from the weight, so finance teams can reconcile what was billed for the carriage against a quoted rate. The nature-of-goods description rounds out the picture, giving customs and handling teams the cargo summary they need without wading through the rest of the form.
Output formats, API, and batch
Every parse is available as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML from the same result. JSON drops into a forwarding platform; CSV and Excel suit ops and finance teams keeping a manifest or rate-check spreadsheet; XML fits older integrations. The free tool reads one AWB at a time, which covers the occasional shipment that lands by email.
When the volume rises — a forwarder handling air consignments all day — the same extraction runs through the Docyield API and batch dashboard, with webhook delivery and your own validation rules. The schema you see in the free tool is what the API returns, so a workflow built on these fields moves to an automated pipeline without any renaming.
How an air waybill differs from a bill of lading
Both are carriage contracts, but the differences are real and worth respecting. An air waybill governs air cargo and is non-negotiable — it is not a document of title, so the carrier releases goods to the named consignee. A bill of lading governs sea or inland freight and can be a negotiable title document surrendered to take delivery. The fields differ too: an AWB centres on airports, piece count, and chargeable weight rather than ports and vessel voyages. A dedicated AWB parser matches the form you actually hold instead of forcing it into an ocean B/L schema.
What the air waybill parser extracts
Each AWB is returned against a fixed schema. Fields not present on a document come back empty rather than guessed.
- AWB number
- The air waybill number, including the airline prefix.
- Carrier
- The issuing carrier or airline.
- Shipper
- The shipper name and address.
- Consignee
- The consignee name and address.
- Origin airport
- The airport of departure, as a code or name.
- Destination airport
- The airport of destination, as a code or name.
- Date of issue
- The date the AWB was issued.
- Pieces
- The number of pieces in the consignment.
- Gross weight
- The gross weight, with its unit where given.
- Nature of goods
- The nature and quantity of the goods carried.
- Charges total
- The total charges for the carriage.
How to convert an air waybill to JSON, CSV, or Excel
- 1Upload your AWB — drop a PDF, PNG, JPG, or WEBP onto the box above, or click to choose a file.
- 2Give Docyield a few seconds to read the form and extract the air-cargo fields.
- 3Review the result and confirm the AWB number, airports, and charges against the original.
- 4Choose your output tab — JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML.
- 5Copy the result or download the file, ready to import into your forwarding system.
Frequently asked questions
Processing documents at scale?
Batch upload, an extraction API, and webhooks for 100+ documents a month.