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Air Travel for Tennis Balls

Q: An overseas customer of mine wishes to purchase some tennis balls. I am of two minds about selling to him, because sometime back when I tried to purchase the pressurized balls overseas from stores in the U.S., they refused on the basis that the lack of air pressure in the cargo bay of the plane would flatten the balls. Is this true?

A: An unpressurized cargo hold at high altitude will have extremely low pressure. Pressurized tennis balls — and for that matter the pressurized cans in which they come — would not flatten if exposed to this low pressure. If anything, they would expand. We checked with Dunlop, and it tell us there is no problem shipping tennis balls via air freight. Penn tells us that its R&D team has determined that the length of exposure to low pressure during air shipment is not long enough to do any damage, despite the pressure differential. Wilson tells us that in its experience there can be some limited seepage when shipping via air, which would cause the balls to go dead, but usually the loss of one or two cans per case is offset by the urgency the of the shipment. With that said, a shipment of tennis balls can become damaged in ways that have nothing to do with internal pressure. During a recent shipment of a case of tennis balls from Southern California to Seattle, the original carton was utterly destroyed. When the shipment arrived, the cans of balls had been repackaged in another, larger box, which was found to contain an electric pencil sharpener that was part of someone else’s shipment. If you decide to fill this customer’s order, we recommend surrounding the original carton of tennis balls with padding, and enclosing it inside another stronger box.

From the February 2005 issue
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