Air Couriers post 9-11: How they still operate

Intel was known many years ago for buying 2 first class seats on a plane for its validation chips for new runs from a fab. They put a person in one seat and a wafer carrier in the other. If you have something sufficiently valuable or important, the cost of a plane ticket just isn't that high.

If the thing you are shipping is so important that it needs to get somewhere so fast that you can't ship it overnight with FedEx, why would you put it in the hands of a stranger?

I think the arguments for this sort of business have changed in the last 12 years because shipping is very fast and not very expensive. Additionally, electronic document delivery and signing is not much more common than it was then.