The e-AWB is IATA’s program for treating the electronic record — the FWB message — as the legal contract of carriage, with no paper air waybill required. The Multilateral e-AWB Agreement (Resolution 672) lets a forwarder sign once with IATA and have it apply across every participating carrier, instead of negotiating a separate bilateral deal airline by airline. Since January 1, 2019, IATA made e-AWB the default contract of carriage on enabled trade lanes.
What actually goes away
The paper original. The paper AWB — issued in three originals (issuing carrier, consignee, and shipper) plus a stack of copies — stops being the source of truth, and the electronic record takes its place. For a consolidation that record is a master FWB plus a house-level FHL. Handoffs no longer wait on a physical document traveling with the freight.
# the legal record goes electronic: paper AWB (3 copies) → e-AWB (the FWB is the contract of carriage) # the data behind it still has to be built and validated: shipper’s letter / PDF / scan → FWB (this is where capture lives)
With , you can build the clean, validated FWB the e-AWB mandate needs — even from a scan.
Start hereWhat doesn’t go away: the data
Going paperless doesn’t create clean data — it just removes the paper. An e-AWB is only as good as the FWB behind it, and that FWB still has to be built from a shipper’s letter of instruction, a booking, or an upstream document that very often arrives as an email attachment, a PDF, or a phone photo. A single-process shipment — no paper backup at all — raises the stakes: if the electronic data is wrong, there is no paper original to fall back on.
Where capture still fits
The gap is between “we’re paperless” and “our data is clean.” A forwarder can be fully e-AWB enabled and still be keying master data by hand off a PDF. AWBGuru’s AWB data capture reads those inbound documents, extracts the AWB fields, validates them — check digit, prefix, weights, route — and outputs a clean FWB, so the record that becomes the legal contract is right the first time instead of corrected after a rejection.