What it is
Cold-chain pharma shipping runs on documented Good Distribution Practice, not vibes. The pharma mode at [/cargo/pharma](/cargo/pharma) turns the relevant rulebooks into a working pre-check: paste a lane, get a GDP-aligned checklist where every requirement cites its source, so you can hand it to QA without re-deriving it.
What it is grounded in
The checklist draws on the standards that actually govern temperature-controlled air freight, each step tagged with where it comes from:
- EU GDP (Guidelines 2013/C 343/01) — distribution practice for medicinal products;
- IATA Temperature Control Regulations (TCR) — the air-cargo handling baseline;
- IATA CEIV Pharma — the certification framework carriers and handlers are audited against.
It also computes a great-circle distance for the lane so you have a sourced figure for the leg, and flags where a handoff or transfer point introduces cold-chain risk.
Where it honestly says "not connected"
This is a knowledge + planning tool, not live telemetry. It is explicit about its edges:
- it does not hold the airline's actual flight legs, so transfer timing is described, not asserted;
- airline cold-room capacity is shown as "not connected — verify with the carrier", never as a live number;
- it does not read a data logger or prove your shipment held temperature. It tells you what GDP requires and what to confirm — the proof of conditions still comes from your own monitoring.
That line between "what the standards require" and "what we cannot see" is the whole value: a checklist you can trust precisely because it doesn't overclaim.
In the wider suite
Pharma mode is one of the [Air Cargo Intelligence tools](/docs/air-cargo-tools) (pre-check, document builder, transit risk, route recommender, scorecard). The same honesty rule runs through all of them: real where the data is real, "not connected" where it isn't.