First Flight Tracking

First Flight Couriers is one of India's oldest private express networks, and it is the rare courier whose most valuable cargo was never really a parcel: bank cards, PIN mailers and PAN cards, which its own rules forbid any branch from handing over anywhere except the address printed on the consignment. Anyone searching for First Flight tracking is usually holding a numeric airway bill issued by one of the roughly 1,200 offices the company grew to from the three it opened in Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi in November 1986. Nine overseas offices, from Mississauga to Changi, carry the same brand abroad, and since December 2015 a UPS Authorised Shipping Outlet agreement has let a First Flight counter book an international express shipment onto UPS metal. The company is also, since 16 May 2026, under a liquidation order from the National Company Law Tribunal in Mumbai.

First Flight Tracking Number Format

A First Flight tracking number is capped at 12 characters, a limit enforced by the validation script on the company's own tracking form, which rejects a consignment number longer than that before the lookup is ever sent. The numbers in general circulation are numeric, with no letter prefix, no check character and no separators.

First Flight uses several names for the same string. The tracking form calls it an Airwaybill number, the terms of carriage call it a waybill and state that "the FFCL Waybill is non-negotiable", the FAQ calls it a consignment number, and branch staff often say docket. All four refer to the identifier printed on the consignor copy handed over at booking.

Two other identifiers are accepted by the same form and are not the AWB. A reference number is the sender's own string, whose format is set by the sender and not by First Flight, which is why a corporate consignor can quote an internal order code and still find the shipment. A booking number is allocated when the pickup is registered. The tracking form exposes all three as radio buttons, and picking the wrong one is a common reason a valid number returns nothing.

First Flight publishes no example number, no prefix key and no format table. No public documentation ties any leading digit to a service, a branch or a route, so a repeated opening digit seen across two consignments is a coincidence of the numbering run rather than a code to decode.

Where to Find First Flight Tracking Number

The number is created at booking, so it exists on paper before it exists in the tracker:

• The consignor copy of the waybill, handed to the sender at the counter or by the field executive who collects the parcel.
• The shipping label pasted on the parcel, above or below the barcode.
• The booking receipt issued by a First Flight branch.
• The dispatch email or SMS sent by a corporate sender, which quotes the AWB against the order.
• The bank, card issuer or government agency that dispatched a card or document, which holds the AWB against the customer record.

An order number issued by a shop or a bank is not a courier number and will not resolve on First Flight's tracker, however many times it is retyped. Where the sender is a corporate account, the AWB usually has to be requested from that sender rather than found on a receipt, because the consignor copy stays with them. The tracker asks for the number alone: no postcode, no phone number and no email address is required to see the events.

First Flight Tracking Number Example

Five different identifiers can attach to a shipment that starts life at a First Flight counter, and only the first three are looked up on First Flight's own tracker:

No worked example number is reproduced here, because First Flight publishes none and inventing one would only teach the wrong pattern.

First Flight Tracking Status Guide

First Flight moves a consignment through a fixed chain that its own e-commerce documentation sets out plainly: every consignment is "first sorted", reaches "the destination HUB", is passed to "the corresponding delivery branch", and from there "reaches the end consumer". The tracker renders that chain as a dated event list, and because each event is written by the branch performing the scan, the exact wording varies between branches. The stages below are the ones a consignment passes through, with what each means in practice.

Why First Flight Tracking Is Not Updating or Not Working

A First Flight tracking page that will not move usually has one of six causes, and only the last is a fault in the tracker itself.

The wrong lookup mode. The tracking form defaults to Airwaybill number and offers Reference number and Booking number as alternatives. A perfectly valid booking number entered while the AWB radio button is selected returns nothing at all, with no error explaining why. Switching the radio button is the first thing to try, and it revives a surprising share of dead lookups.

Awaiting the first scan. The AWB is generated at booking, not at collection, so the number can be printed and handed over hours before the parcel physically enters the network. Until the origin branch scans it, the tracker holds no events. Where a corporate sender books in bulk and hands the shipments over at the end of the day, a gap of a working day between the number being issued and the first scan is ordinary.

The consignment is with a different First Flight company. First Flight Couriers (Middle East) LLC in Dubai, First Flight Couriers (Middle East) WLL in Doha, First Flight Singapore Pte Ltd and First Flight Couriers Sdn Bhd in Malaysia are separately incorporated companies sharing the brand. Their consignments run on their own systems, and their numbers do not resolve on the Indian site.

An international shipment that has left the network. Where an international express shipment was booked at a First Flight counter under the UPS agreement, the leg that leaves India runs on UPS's network under a 1Z number. The First Flight AWB stops updating at the handoff, which reads as a stalled tracker when the parcel is in fact moving normally under a different number.

In transit between hubs. A surface consignment crossing India can run two or three days without a scan, and the company's terms disclaim liability for delay in any event. A quiet tracker whose last event is a hub scan describes a parcel in motion, not a lost one.

The tracker is genuinely down. The tracking form posts to a single endpoint and shows a blank result panel when that endpoint does not answer, so an outage looks identical to an unknown number. Retrying an hour later separates the two: a number that resolved yesterday and returns nothing today points to an availability problem, not a lost parcel.

Where none of these apply and no scan has been added for several working days, the sender is the party to approach first. The sender holds the contract of carriage, holds the consignor copy, and is the only party First Flight will discuss a claim with.

What the Liquidation Order Means for a Consignment or a Claim

The Mumbai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal ordered the liquidation of First Flight Couriers Ltd on 16 May 2026, and the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India's public record shows the appointment of Mahesh Kumar Gupta as liquidator under an order dated 19 May 2026. The bench of K. R. Saji Kumar and Anil Raj Chellan put its reasoning briefly:

"In view of the aforesaid facts and circumstances, this Bench is satisfied that the requirements of Section 33 of the Code are duly fulfilled and that continuation of CIRP would serve no useful purpose." (NCLT Mumbai, liquidation order in the matter of First Flight Couriers Ltd, 16 May 2026.)

The road to that order was long. The corporate insolvency resolution process began on 3 October 2022 on a Section 9 petition by Srinidhi Comprint Pvt Ltd over a default of about Rs 1.44 crore. A resolution plan from Autope Payments Pvt Ltd was approved by the committee of creditors with a 78.41% voting share in December 2023, but the tribunal sent it back on 26 June 2024 because it did not provide in full for dues owed to the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation. At the 21st meeting of the committee on 26 December 2024, creditors holding 69.65% resolved to liquidate instead.

Two practical consequences follow for anyone holding a First Flight AWB. The first is that the company's own 90-day claim window, the clause stating that no claim will be accepted beyond ninety days from the date of booking, is no longer the operative route for a loss or damage claim: a claim against a company in liquidation is filed with the liquidator through the process the IBBI publishes, not with a branch. The second is that the position of any individual branch is not something the public record settles. The corporate website and its tracker remain reachable, but a consignment in transit, an unresolved complaint or an outstanding claim is better raised with the sender, who can act on it commercially, than left to a tracking page.

The order is against the Indian parent, First Flight Couriers Ltd, CIN U64100MH1988PLC047228. It does not by itself determine the status of the separately incorporated First Flight companies in the UAE, Qatar, Singapore, Malaysia, Nepal, Canada or the United States.

Services and Product Lines Compared

First Flight built ten distinct product lines rather than a simple express-or-economy split, and the identifier used to trace a shipment depends on which one it was booked under.

Alongside the products sit three ways to watch a consignment without opening the tracker: email tracking, SMS tracking, and a bulk lookup that accepts up to 10 numbers at once, a ceiling the tracking form enforces with a message saying at most ten shipments can be tracked at a time.

Delivery Times, Air and Surface Routing

First Flight publishes no service-level transit matrix, no guaranteed delivery window and no city-pair timetable, and its terms of carriage go further than silence: clause 9 states that the company "shall not under any circumstances be liable for delay in delivery of the said consignment, regardless of the cause of such delay". Any transit figure quoted for First Flight by a third party is an observation, not a published commitment, and none is reproduced here.

What the company does document are the variables that decide the time. Clause 6 lets First Flight move a consignment by air or by surface at its discretion, so two parcels on the same lane, booked on the same day, can take materially different routes and arrive days apart. Serviceability is a hard gate rather than a delay: the FAQ states that where a PIN code is not on the serviceable list, First Flight will not perform the pickup or the booking at all, which is why the PIN code lookup matters more than the product chosen. Sunday delivery exists but is not universal, running only on specific PIN codes and at a tariff that may differ from the normal rate.

Delivery is to the door by default. The terms state that unless otherwise specified, delivery is made to the consignee at the doorstep only, and the consignee address must carry both a PIN code and a telephone number, because First Flight treats an incomplete address as a delivery risk rather than a detail. Post box addresses are refused outright, and no proof of delivery is issued for post box, tender or government-document consignments.

Chargeable Weight, Risk Coverage and Lost Shipment Claims

First Flight charges the higher of actual and volumetric weight, a rule its FAQ states without qualification: where the volumetric weight of a consignment exceeds the dead weight, the volumetric figure applies, and the weight taken at the booking office governs regardless of what the sender estimated.

Cover for loss is narrow, and is worth reading before a valuable item is handed over. Automatic Risk Coverage is limited to actual loss of Rs 5,000 for documents and Rs 10,000 for parcels, whichever is less, and a consignor holding a marine policy is not entitled to claim at all. Above Rs 10,000 the surcharge is tiered: a non-document valued between Rs 10,001 and Rs 20,000 attracts Rs 5, with a further Rs 5 for every multiple of Rs 10,000 or part thereof, to a maximum of Rs 100,000. That last figure is also the value limit of acceptance, so a consignment worth more than Rs 100,000 is not one First Flight undertakes to carry.

A damaged parcel has a specific procedure, and it happens at the door rather than afterwards. First Flight's instruction is that the recipient should accept the consignment and record the condition of the contents on the delivery run sheet at the time of delivery, which creates the contemporaneous record any later claim depends on. A signature given without that remark makes damage far harder to establish.

The prohibited list is long, and includes several things senders routinely assume are acceptable: currency, gems and jewellery, gold, liquids, drugs, explosives, hazardous chemicals, radioactive material, pornographic material, and letters and personal mail, which are reserved to the postal system. Consignments must be presented open, since a sealed consignment is not booked, and parcels handed over tied together are refused. A lost demand draft is capped separately, with First Flight bearing the actual cost of obtaining a duplicate or Rs 5,000, whichever is less. With the company in liquidation, a claim under any of these clauses now runs through the liquidator rather than through a branch.

Which Countries Does First Flight Deliver To?

First Flight international tracking spans a network that is overwhelmingly a domestic Indian one with a small set of company-owned overseas nodes attached. The company lists nine international offices across eight countries: Canada, through FFCL Couriers Inc. in Mississauga; Malaysia, through First Flight Couriers Sdn Bhd in Johor Bahru and Kuala Lumpur; Nepal, in Kathmandu near the airport; Oman, through the agent Towell Barwil Co LLC in Muttrah; Qatar, through First Flight Couriers (Middle East) WLL in Doha; Singapore, through First Flight Singapore Pte Ltd at the Changi Airfreight Centre; the United Arab Emirates, through First Flight Couriers (Middle East) LLC in Dubai with branches in Abu Dhabi and Sharjah; and the United States, on West 38th Street in New York.

Domestic coverage is where the network's weight sits. Twenty regional offices anchor it: Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Chennai, Coimbatore, Delhi, Gurgaon, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Jamshedpur, Kochi, Kolkata, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Mumbai, Noida, Pune and Salem. Beneath them sit the branches that took the total to roughly 1,200 offices at the network's height. Coverage is decided PIN code by PIN code rather than state by state, and the company runs a serviceable PIN code lookup precisely because a district town two hours from a regional office may not be on the list. Where a PIN code is not serviceable, India Post is usually the only network that reaches it, since the postal service is the one carrier in India with a universal service obligation.

Delivery beyond those eight countries does not run on First Flight metal. An international express shipment booked at a First Flight counter is handed to a partner network for the cross-border leg, which is exactly what the UPS Authorised Shipping Outlet agreement exists to do, and the destination reach is then that partner's rather than First Flight's.

Cross-Border Customs and the UPS Handoff

On 15 December 2015, UPS announced that First Flight Couriers Ltd would become a UPS Authorised Shipping Outlet in India, letting customers book international shipments at First Flight counters that then travel on UPS's global network. First Flight's chairman and managing director at the time framed the arrangement in the announcement:

"Working with UPS will help us raise the bar of our service capabilities and offer our customers international reach. The combination of our respective networks, process know-how and operations expertise will allow us to offer an unprecedented level of convenience to our retail and enterprise customers." (O. P. Saboo, Chairman and Managing Director, First Flight Couriers Ltd, 15 December 2015.)

The tracking consequence is the part that surprises senders. A shipment booked this way generates a First Flight record at the counter and a UPS 1Z number for the international movement, and it is the 1Z number that carries the customs and delivery events abroad. That UPS number should be requested at the counter, because the First Flight AWB falls quiet at the handoff and stays quiet.

Customs responsibility sits with the sender, and First Flight's language is unusually blunt about it. The consignor warrants that the description of the goods on the waybill matches the actual contents and does not contravene the Indian postal legislation or any other law, and the consignor alone is liable for all costs, penalties and proceedings, expressly including octroi and any other charge levied by a central, state or local authority. Where a levy falls due, First Flight is entitled to withhold delivery until the consignee pays it, which is a common and easily misread reason for a consignment sitting at a delivery branch with no further scan. The two international products are named plainly, International Express Dox for documents and Non-Dox for everything else, and the distinction matters at customs because a Dox shipment carries no commercial invoice.

Marketplace Collaborations

First Flight ran a dedicated e-commerce product line, and its own description of it names the flow rather than the customers: a consignment is sorted, reaches the destination hub, passes to the delivery branch, and goes to the end consumer. Its client wall is a carousel of 47 logos with no named marketplace in the page text, and the company names no marketplace partner in any public material, so no marketplace tie-up is asserted here that the company does not assert itself. Its retail weight has historically come from enterprise contracts, particularly banking and financial services card and document dispatch, rather than from marketplace parcel volume.

That matters for a shopper trying to identify a courier. India's large marketplaces route the bulk of their volume through networks they own or contract directly: Flipkart through Ekart, Amazon through its own logistics arm, and Meesho and the smaller platforms through an aggregation layer that spreads parcels across Delhivery, Blue Dart, DTDC and others. A First Flight AWB against a marketplace order is therefore uncommon, and where one does appear, the marketplace's own order timeline names the carrier authoritatively. Checking there is faster than guessing from the number, since a First Flight number carries no service or client prefix to read.

With the company under a liquidation order since May 2026, any current marketplace or enterprise contract is a matter for the liquidator rather than a live commercial relationship, and a merchant still dispatching on a First Flight account has good reason to confirm its standing before booking further volume.

About First Flight Couriers

First Flight Couriers Ltd was incorporated in Maharashtra in 1988 under CIN U64100MH1988PLC047228, having begun operations, on its own account, in November 1986 with three offices in Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi. Its corporate and registered office is at Lotus Corporate Park, off the Jay Coach Flyover on the Western Express Highway, Goregaon East, Mumbai 400 063. The company describes its own trajectory without much modesty:

"Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi, our early nests have metamorphosed into 1200 First Flight offices across the length and breath of the country and with 9 international offices in prime locations make us a prominent global player." (First Flight Couriers Ltd, company website, Our Journey.)

The business that grew from those three offices was never mainly a consumer parcel network. Its distinctive franchise was secured document and card logistics for banks and government, work that shows up in the operating rules rather than in the marketing: a PAN card, a credit card, a debit card or a PIN mailer is excluded from the branch-collection option every other consignment enjoys, and is delivered only to the address on the consignment. Around that sat corporate mailroom volume, a reverse logistics arm, air and train cargo, and from 2015 the UPS outlet agreement for international express. In the private express market it met Blue Dart at the premium end and DTDC's franchise network at the volume end, while Delhivery and the e-commerce-native carriers took the parcel growth of the 2010s that First Flight's enterprise-led model was slower to capture.

The company's public standing today is set by the insolvency record rather than by the network. The corporate insolvency resolution process ran from 3 October 2022 until the NCLT's Mumbai bench ordered liquidation on 16 May 2026 and appointed Mahesh Kumar Gupta as liquidator. The proximate cause was a resolution plan that could not be made to provide in full for provident fund dues, and a creditors' committee that concluded no viable proposal remained. Company details in this article are drawn from First Flight's own website, the insolvency record from the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India, and the terms of the liquidation order as reported by LiveLaw and by the Free Press Journal.