That means a nonstop on a lane with several daily departures is a materially different risk from a one stop routing on a thin lane, even when the total transit time is similar. The corridor pages on this site publish the scheduled frequency and the number of operating carriers for each pair precisely because those two numbers, not the flight time, are what decide how bad a bad day gets. See the corridor pages.
Air freight · temperature control
Temperature controlled and pharma lanes
The four things a cold chain shipment needs, why routing matters more than flight time, and an honest statement of what this desk is not certified to do.
- Common range
- 2 to 8°C
- Controlled ambient
- 15 to 25°C
- Dry ice
- UN1845, class 9
- Certification held here
- None
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.
What temperature control means in practice
A temperature controlled air shipment is a shipment with a stated range, a means of holding it, a record proving it was held, and a chain of parties who each know what happens to it while they have it. Any of those four missing turns it into an ordinary shipment with a thermometer in the box.
The common ranges are 2 to 8 degrees for most refrigerated pharmaceuticals, 15 to 25 degrees for controlled ambient, and deep frozen ranges held on dry ice or on liquid nitrogen dry vapour for biological material. The range is the requirement. How it is held is the design decision.
Passive against active
Passive shippers
An insulated box with pre conditioned phase change material, gel packs or dry ice, validated to hold a stated range for a stated duration under a stated ambient profile.
Light, no power, no positioning, and cheap enough to be single use. The limitation is the clock: a 96 hour shipper is a 96 hour shipper, and a delay that runs past it is an excursion whatever anybody intended.
Active containers
Powered units that regulate and log their own temperature, generally to a tighter tolerance, and generally reportable in flight.
They have to be reserved, positioned, charged and returned, which is a lead time and a cost. They are the right answer on long routings, on lanes where delays are likely, and where the value of the consignment makes the container cost irrelevant.
Dry ice is dangerous goods
Solid carbon dioxide is UN1845, class 9, with quantity limits per package and a declaration requirement. A pharma shipment cooled with dry ice is a dangerous goods shipment as well as a cold chain shipment, and both sets of paperwork apply. See the dangerous goods page.
The label is not the control
Time and temperature sensitive labelling tells a handler that the shipment matters. It does not make anybody keep it cold. What keeps it cold is the shipper design, the routing and the handling agreement, in that order.
Why routing matters more than flight time
The temperature risk in an air movement is concentrated in the moments when the shipment is neither in a controlled room nor in the aircraft: on the apron waiting for loading, in transfer between two flights, in a shed at the far end, and in the gap between break down and collection.
It also means the pharma clusters that generate these shipments sit where they do for a reason. This site holds public industrial geography for the airports it covers, and the pharma and life science sites in it cluster around a small number of European gates. Those are named on the corridor pages, as industrial geography rather than as anybody's customer list.
Where a hand carry fits, and where it does not
A courier can carry a validated passive shipper in the cabin. For clinical trial samples, comparators, small batches of a temperature sensitive product and diagnostic material, this removes the apron, the shed and the transfer, because the box is with a person for the whole movement and goes from a controlled room to a controlled room.
The limits are honest and hard. Cabin dimensions. 32 kg. Dry ice quantities inside the passenger dangerous goods rules. And no certification claim: this desk places couriers and does not hold GDP or CEIV certification. A movement that needs a certified chain end to end needs a forwarder who has one, and the enquiry form on this site passes it to one.
Questions people actually ask
01Passive or active?
Passive means an insulated shipper with a pre conditioned phase change material or dry ice inside it, holding a range for a stated number of hours with no power. Active means a powered container that regulates its own temperature and reports it. Passive is lighter, cheaper and has a hard time limit. Active costs more, needs charging and positioning, and does not care how long the delay is as long as it has power.
02What is CEIV Pharma?
An IATA certification programme for airlines, ground handlers, forwarders and airports handling pharmaceutical shipments, built on Good Distribution Practice. It is a statement about the handler, not about your shipment, and it is worth asking which parties on a routing hold it. This desk does not hold it and does not claim to.
03Where do excursions actually happen?
Almost never in the air. They happen on the apron waiting for a unit to be loaded, in a shed that is not temperature controlled, during a transfer between two flights, and at the far end between break down and collection. A routing with one connection has roughly twice as many of those moments as a nonstop, which is why frequency and directness matter more than flight time on a cold chain lane.
04Can a courier carry a cold chain shipment?
A courier can carry a passive shipper as cabin baggage within the cabin size and weight limits, and this is done for clinical samples and small pharma consignments. The advantage is that the box never leaves a person and never sits on an apron. The limits are real: cabin dimensions, 32 kg, and dry ice quantity rules, since dry ice is itself a dangerous good.
05Do you hold pharma certification?
No. OnBoard Courier is a placement desk and it does not hold GDP or CEIV certification, does not operate temperature controlled facilities and does not validate shippers. Where a movement needs a certified chain, the enquiry goes to a forwarding partner who can provide one.
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