Special Handling Codes (SHC) are the standard three-letter IATA codes that appear in the handling-information area of an air waybill. Each one tells everyone downstream — the carrier, the ground handler, the ramp — that a shipment needs particular treatment: temperature control, live-animal care, dangerous-goods segregation, a cargo-only aircraft. A single AWB can carry several at once.
A note on the initials: the codes themselves are Special Handling Codes — SHC — which is how handlers and forwarders usually refer to them. On the air waybill (and in the underlying IATA e-AWB / Cargo-IMP message), the field they sit in is identified as SPH. Same subject, two initialisms: SHC is the code, SPH is the box it goes in.
A working sampler, not the whole list
With , you can validate every special-handling code before it reaches the ramp.
Start hereWhy a wrong code matters
These codes drive physical handling and legal acceptance, so an error is not cosmetic. A missed dangerous-goods code can put undeclared hazardous cargo on a passenger aircraft. A wrong or missing CAO can route cargo-only freight onto the wrong aircraft type. A dropped PER or ICE can spoil a temperature-sensitive shipment. Unlike a mis-keyed reference number, these mistakes have safety and regulatory consequences.
Capturing the handling box
The codes sit in a semi-structured field, often several at a time and sometimes mixed with free text. AWBGuru’s AWB data capture extracts the handling-information (SPH) field, isolates the SHC codes, and validates them against the IATA code set — flagging an unknown or malformed code to review instead of passing it downstream. The result feeds the document’s confidence score, so a questionable handling code routes to a human rather than into a clean-looking record.