The default. A forwarder books space, the shipment is accepted, screened, built onto a unit and flown, usually in the belly of a passenger aircraft or on a freighter, usually consolidated with other people's shipments under one master air waybill.
Air freight · service levels
General cargo, express, courier, hand carry
Four contracts with four failure modes, routinely compared on price and transit time alone, which is the comparison that hides everything that matters.
- Products compared
- Four
- Hand carry ceiling
- 32 kg
- Express divisor, commonly
- 5000
- Air cargo divisor
- 6000
What this desk is. OnBoard Courier places on board couriers: a vetted person carries the consignment in the cabin on a scheduled passenger flight and hands it over against a signature. The desk does not operate air freight, does not hold an airline contract and is not a forwarder. Air freight enquiries sent through this site are passed to a vetted forwarding partner, and the pages here are written so that you can tell which of the two you actually need.
Four products, sold as though they were one
General cargo, priority air freight, express and a hand carry are four different contracts with four different failure modes. They are routinely compared on price and transit time alone, which is the comparison that hides everything that matters.
The table below is the honest summary. What follows it is the detail behind each column, because the columns are where quotations disagree.
Side by side
| Product | What you are charged for | What you are promised | Ceiling | How it behaves when something goes wrong |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| General cargo | Chargeable weight, lowest rate, consolidated | Space subject to capacity, offloaded first | No practical ceiling | Days, and a missed flight can cost several |
| Priority air freight | Chargeable weight at a premium rate | Booked ahead of general cargo, less likely to be offloaded | No practical ceiling | Faster and more reliable, still a queue at both ends |
| Express and courier | Often a 5000 divisor, published tariff, door to door | Time definite on the integrator’s own network | Piece and size limits apply | Reliable where the network reaches, rigid where it does not |
| On board courier | A seat, a courier and desk time, not a rate per kilo | A named person keeps custody the whole way | 32 kg per courier | Fastest on a bad day, because a miss is rebooked like a passenger |
The hand carry row describes this desk's own service. The other three rows describe products bought from airlines, forwarders and integrators, and are written from the operating experience of quoting against them rather than from any one carrier's tariff.
General cargo
It is the cheapest per kilo and it is the first thing to be offloaded. That is not a criticism of anybody, it is the deal: you bought space if there is space. On a lane with several daily departures the consequence is hours. On a thin lane it is days, which is why the corridor pages on this site publish the actual scheduled frequency for each pair rather than a comfortable phrase like "daily service".
Priority air freight
The same physical process with a better place in the queue and, usually, a booking the carrier is more committed to holding. Some carriers attach a service promise and a remedy to it. Others simply price it higher and load it first.
It is worth buying when the shipment is large enough that a hand carry is not an option and late enough that being offloaded would hurt. It is worth checking what the promise actually is, because "priority" without a defined remedy is a loading preference rather than a commitment.
Express and courier
An integrator sells a door to door product on a network it controls end to end, with its own aircraft, its own hubs and its own customs procedures. Where that network reaches, it is excellent and it is time definite. Where it does not, or where the shipment is too large or too unusual for the product, it becomes ordinary air freight with an express label and the timings quietly stop applying.
Two practical points. Express tariffs commonly compute volumetric weight on a divisor of 5000 rather than 6000, so the same box costs more, which is worked through on the chargeable weight page. And the simplified customs procedure that makes courier shipments fast has value and weight thresholds; above them the shipment needs a full entry and the speed advantage disappears.
On board courier
A vetted person is ticketed on a scheduled passenger flight, collects the consignment, keeps it in the cabin, declares it in person on arrival and hands it over against a signature. It never joins a cargo network and is never handed to a freight agent at either end.
The ceiling is 32 kg for one courier, and above that either two couriers fly or the answer is air freight. The price is an airfare, a courier and desk time, so it is expensive per kilo and indifferent to volume within cabin limits. It is bought for the two things nothing else provides: unbroken custody, and a recovery on a bad day that is a passenger rebooking rather than a capacity request.
This is the service the desk that publishes these pages actually places. Air freight enquiries are passed to a vetted forwarding partner.
Questions people actually ask
01Is express the same as courier?
In everyday speech yes, in an air cargo tariff no. Express is a product an integrator sells on its own network with a time definite commitment. Courier, in the sense the regulations use, is a shipment moving under a courier manifest through a simplified customs procedure. Most of what people call courier is express, and the distinction matters when a shipment is too big for the courier procedure and quietly becomes general cargo with none of the timings anybody assumed.
02Why is general cargo so much cheaper?
Because it buys space in a queue rather than a commitment. A general cargo booking is space on a flight, subject to capacity, and if a higher priority booking or the aircraft's weight and balance needs the space, general cargo is what comes off. The price difference between general and priority products is largely the price of not being the shipment that gets offloaded.
03What is next flight out?
A product name rather than a technical term, sold by both express operators and hand carry desks. From an integrator it means the shipment is booked onto the next departure with capacity rather than the next consolidation. From a hand carry desk it means a courier is ticketed on the next departure with a seat. The two look similar on a quotation and behave very differently when the flight is missed.
04Which one do I ask for?
Work backwards from the date and the failure cost. If being a day late costs nothing, general cargo. If it costs a shift, a priority air freight product. If it costs a production line or an aircraft, a hand carry, and the freight bill has stopped being the number that matters. The AOG page is about that last case.
Where this came from
- Scheduled network, airlines and frequencies: AeroDataBox scheduled route statistics as held by this site, retrieved 2026-09-07. It is a snapshot rather than a live timetable, it includes some all cargo operators but is not a complete freighter schedule, and a carrier that is not listed may still fly the pair.
- Distances: Great circle, computed from published airport coordinates. They are shorter than a flown track and are not routing distances.
- Block times: Modelled, not measured: great circle distance times a track factor of 1.06, divided by a cruise speed of 720, 830 or 880 km/h by distance band, plus thirty minutes of taxi across the two ends. This is the same model the route calculator on this site uses. A real timetable will differ.
- Industrial sites: Public company information, checked 2026-09-07. Nothing here states or implies that any company named is a customer of OnBoard Courier or of any operator.
- Air cargo rules and definitions: The ICAO Technical Instructions and the IATA Dangerous Goods Regulations for dangerous goods, IATA Resolution 600a for the air waybill, the Montreal Convention 1999 for carrier liability, and Incoterms 2020. Where this site holds no figure of its own it says so rather than inventing one.
Who publishes this. OnBoard Courier is a hand carry placement desk in Dubai. It does not fly air freight. These pages exist because the desk is asked to rescue air freight that has run out of time often enough to have learned where the line between the two sits, and because a comparison written by somebody who sells only one of the two options is not a comparison. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it.
Air freight, the comparison · Corridors · The Atlas · Route calculator