SACRAMENTO, Calif. - A $44 billion deal for FedEx Corp. to transport mail for the U.S. Postal Service could have a major impact on the growing air cargo industry in Sacramento County, officials said Thursday.

But questions drastically outnumber answers about the landmark alliance. "This is a little like the snake that swallowed the rooster," said a source close to and puzzled by the agreement. "It's gonna take a while to digest this."

The stakes are high, including much-coveted jobs and more than $1 million a year that Sacramento County is receiving from Kitty Hawk Inc., an air cargo carrier that operates the Postal Service's Western air network, or hub, from Mather Field.

Cheryl Demetriff, a deputy director for the county airport department, said Kitty Hawk paid about $1.1 million last year to ship about 219 million pounds of mail between Mather and spokes on the hub such as Seattle, Portland, San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver and Las Vegas.

Kitty Hawk's operation, under a six-year contract with the Postal Service, essentially put Mather on the map in the air cargo industry, officials said. It also put the airfield at the former Air Force Base in the black for the first time.

While the air cargo roster at Mather Field includes carriers such as UPS, Airborne Express, Emery Worldwide, DHL and Eagle Global, Kitty Hawk represents about a third of the county's revenue from the airfield, Demetriff said. Kitty Hawk also represents the majority of flights in and out of Mather.

FedEx, meanwhile, paid the county about $600,000 in 2000 for its operation at Sacramento International Airport. FedEx moved about 76 million pounds of cargo through the airport last year, Demetriff said.

The future of both of those arrangements apparently will be determined in negotiations between FedEx and the Postal Service.

But Postal Service spokeswoman Monica Hand said Thursday that all major transportation contracts, including the deal with Kitty Hawk that extends until August 2005, will be terminated. Terms and timing of those terminations still are being resolved, she said.

The seven-year contract, for $6.3 billion a year, for FedEx to transport Express, Priority and perhaps some first-class mail was announced last month. The deal was linked to a separate agreement that will allow FedEx to put drop boxes at post offices.

The deal does not take effect until August, however, and nobody is saying much about how it will shake out. "There are things going on between FedEx and the Postal Service that we don't have any intelligence on," said G. Hardy Acree, Sacramento County's airport director.

Ed Coleman, a FedEx spokesman at corporate headquarters in Memphis, said the agreement with the Postal Service calls for FedEx to transport about 3.5 million pounds of mail daily between airports.

Coleman said no details have been released about how the deal will be implemented. FedEx has no plans to move its Sacramento operation from International to Mather or any other airports, Coleman said, and any additional service could be incorporated into existing flights or additional flights from International. He also noted that FedEx has a major hub operation at Oakland International Airport.

A spokesman said Kitty Hawk is studying the situation and that it was too soon for any comment. Kitty Hawk, which has about 125 employees and contract workers at Mather, also is working to emerge from voluntary bankruptcy proceedings.

Further complicating things is the "interim" label that has been stuck on Kitty Hawk's operation at Mather since it began in mid-1999.

The Postal Service's western network previously was based in Oakland, said Gary Thuro, manager of tactical operations planning for the post office in Washington, D.C.

About 18 months ago, the Postal Service planned to move the hub to Reno because Oakland could not accommodate the larger aircraft necessary to operate the network, Thuro said.

The plan ran into "a hailstorm" of controversy in Reno, however, mostly concerns about noise from the network's nighttime flights, he said.

"Fortunately, while all that turmoil was going on, Mather was able to accommodate us," he said. The network has operated there almost flawlessly from the beginning," he said.

Most officials said Reno does not appear to be an option any longer, but the Mather operation continues to run on a series of 90-day extensions of the temporary agreement.