An aircraft on ground costs an operator up to $20,000 an hour. Our AOG desk puts your spare part in a courier’s hand and on the next departure from Dubai, to any airport in the world, day or night.
Answer within 15 minutes · 24/7/365 · Dubai (DXB, DWC), Abu Dhabi (AUH), Sharjah (SHJ) · 128 airports worldwide
The freight chain is not slow because aircraft are slow, it is slow because a consignment waits at every handover. A courier removes the queues, not the kilometres.
Five short questions. A dispatcher replies with a named departure, the delivery hour and one fixed price, day and night.
An AOG courier is an on board courier who hand-carries an aircraft spare part to a grounded aircraft on the next available flight. AOG stands for “aircraft on ground”, the state in which an aircraft cannot fly until a specific component is replaced.
Instead of booking the part into air cargo, where it waits for consolidation and customs batching, the part is carried in the cabin by a named courier who departs within hours. From Dubai, this typically means a European or Asian line station has the component the same day, with the engineer signing for it in arrivals.
Dubai is one of the best-connected AOG origins in the world: DXB serves 240+ destinations around the clock, and the couriers the desk places monitor DXB, DWC and AUH departures in real time.
Our AOG desk is staffed 24/7. From confirmation to airport, typically under four hours.
Couriers briefed on dangerous-goods rules, ESD handling and rotable paperwork before departure.
Airway bills, EASA Form 1 / FAA 8130 copies, commercial invoices and carnets prepared with the shipment.
Direct handover to your engineer or MRO at arrivals, signed and timestamped.
128 airports, including every major MRO hub in Europe, Asia and Africa.
Your AOG desk, our AOG desk, one thread from quote to touchdown, with every confirmation in writing.
How we work. OnBoard Courier operates as a specialist coordination and courier-matching platform based in the UAE. Depending on the shipment, transport is performed by vetted independent couriers or coordinated with licensed logistics providers, customs specialists and appropriately certified handling partners. For regulated pharmaceutical, biological and dangerous-goods consignments we work with partners who hold the relevant licences, training or certification, acceptance is always subject to cargo classification, packaging, documentation, airline approval and the regulations of every country involved. We are independent and not affiliated with any airline.
A hand-carry is only as fast as the next departure. The desk watches three boards at once and books the one that lands first, then holds the one that leaves next.
Between one and four in the morning Emirates pushes back a wave of widebodies from Terminal 3 that reach Europe before the first meeting and Asia by the afternoon. For your consignment that wave is the reason a courier confirmed at eight in the evening is still delivering the next day.
Widebody only, non-stop to 140 plus citiesFrom Terminal 2 flydubai runs the one to five hour sectors: the Caucasus, Central Asia, East Africa, the Balkans, the subcontinent. Where a widebody leaves once a day, flydubai often leaves three times, which turns a missed slot into a ninety minute delay rather than a lost day.
Frequency is the fallbackNinety minutes down the E11, Etihad leaves from Zayed International with its own bank of departures and, for the United States, immigration cleared before boarding. When the Dubai departure for your consignment is gone, the desk looks at Abu Dhabi before it looks at tomorrow.
US preclearance at AUHThe desk holds no allegiance to a carrier. The booking goes to whichever board puts a courier at your consignment first, at a fare the quote can carry.
Five questions, one fixed price, a named flight. The desk answers within 15 minutes, day and night, and you decide.
The sequence our AOG desk runs the moment your message arrives.
Email us the part, weight, destination station and required-by time. Quote in 15 to 30 minutes.
We select the earliest departure that clears customs in time and assign a courier already cleared for that route.
Pickup at your Dubai warehouse, MRO or DXB cargo village, sealed, documented, ESD-safe where required.
The part travels in the cabin. We send live updates at check-in, departure and landing.
Handover at the line station or arrivals hall with signature, photo and timestamp.
Typical timings from DXB. Every major MRO hub is reachable same-day or next-morning.
| Route | Airports | Typical timing |
|---|---|---|
| Dubai → London | DXB → LHR | ~7h 30m flight · same-day arrival |
| Dubai → Frankfurt | DXB → FRA | ~6h 30m flight · same-day arrival |
| Dubai → Paris | DXB → CDG | ~7h flight · same-day arrival |
| Dubai → Zurich | DXB → ZRH | ~6h 30m flight · same-day arrival |
| Dubai → New York | DXB → JFK | ~14h flight · same-day arrival |
| Dubai → Singapore | DXB → SIN | ~7h 30m flight · same-day arrival |
| Dubai → Hong Kong | DXB → HKG | ~8h flight · same-day arrival |
| Dubai → Mumbai | DXB → BOM | ~3h flight · same-day arrival |
| Dubai → Delhi | DXB → DEL | ~3h 30m flight · same-day arrival |
| Dubai → Tokyo | DXB → NRT | ~10h flight · next-morning arrival |
| Dubai → Johannesburg | DXB → JNB | ~8h flight · same-day arrival |
| Dubai → Nairobi | DXB → NBO | ~5h flight · same-day arrival |
Every shipment on this page could also travel as air cargo. Here is the honest difference between putting it in a hold and putting a person in a seat with it.
A person in a seat
A parcel in a system
To be straight about it: air cargo is not a bad service, it is a different one. It moves weight cheaply and it does that extremely well. A hand-carry buys back hours, and it is worth paying for exactly when an hour of delay costs more than a seat on a plane, which is the case far more often than most shippers assume, and far less often than most courier companies claim.
People usually find this service when something has already gone wrong: a line has stopped, a sample is about to expire, a document has to be somewhere tomorrow that it cannot reach. It is worth understanding how the service works before that day rather than during it.
What clients are actually buying is the removal of every handover. In a normal air freight movement a consignment changes hands seven or eight times: shipper, forwarder, handling agent, ramp, aircraft, ramp, break-bulk, broker, delivery agent. Each handover is a queue and each queue is where hours disappear. A courier reduces that number to one, collection, and one more, delivery.
The other thing being bought is answerability. When a customs officer has a question about a shipment, the shipment cannot answer, so it waits for someone who can. When the question is asked of a courier standing at the counter with the invoice in their hand, it is answered immediately. That is not a marketing claim; it is the entire operational advantage compressed into one sentence.
What that adds up to for the destination is a service you should use when the deadline is real and ignore when it is not. We would rather tell you to send it as express freight and keep the relationship than sell you a courier for a box that could have travelled overnight anyway.
Most people booking a courier for the first time want to know what the hours look like. This is the real sequence for an assignment, the parts we control, the parts the airline controls, and the part where customs decides how the day goes.
The first conversation is short and specific: contents, declared value, collection address, delivery address at the destination, and the real deadline rather than the comfortable one. If there are batteries, powders, liquids, biological material or anything regulated in the box, that is the moment to say so, not at the check-in desk.
Before a price exists we screen the parties, the commodity and the route against sanctions and export-control lists, and we check whether the destination requires a permit or a licensed consignee for that category. This is also where we occasionally say no, and a provider who never says no has simply moved the risk onto you.
Assignment is not a raffle. The consignment's value, its regulatory profile and the destination decide who is offered it. Visa eligibility usually narrows the list faster than availability does, which is exactly why a global courier network is worth having.
At collection the seal number is recorded, the goods are photographed and the paperwork is checked line by line against what is in the box. A description that does not match the contents is a common reason a hand-carry is held at the arrival airport, and it is entirely preventable.
It stays in one named courier's documented custody for the whole sector, in the aircraft cabin wherever size, classification, security rules and the operating airline permit it, and otherwise under an approved accompanied process. On the ground at any transit point the courier stays airside with it. There is no depot, no consolidation window and no overnight sort anywhere in the routing.
Clearance at the arrival airport happens with a person standing at the counter who can answer questions about the goods on the spot, which is the whole reason a query takes minutes here and a day in the cargo channel. Then the delivery, in person, against signature and ID.
Hand-carry demand is not evenly spread, it clusters in industries where an hour of delay costs more than the flight. These are the ones that book us most often, and what they send.
Prototypes under confidentiality, homologation samples, tooling inserts and line-critical components moving to build schedules that were fixed months ago.
A controller, a bearing, a die or a sensor whose absence has stopped a shift. The part is usually small and cheap; the stoppage behind it is neither.
Wafers, reticles, test boards, display panels and pre-production units. Small, fragile, export-controlled and usually holding up a fab, a lab or a product launch somewhere.
A grounded aircraft costs more per hour than the entire logistics budget for the month. Rotables, avionics, seals and the certification paperwork that must travel with them are the most time-sensitive freight that exists, and the desk sees them regularly.
Downhole and subsea electronics, marine spares for a vessel with a sailing window, assay samples with a chain-of-custody requirement, and project equipment on a contractual schedule.
Closing documents, tender submissions, legalised certificates, guarantees and instruments that only count as originals. A scan is not a submission, and a deadline at the destination is usually a clock on a wall rather than a courtesy.
Nothing delays a hand-carry as reliably as a document that says something different from the box. This is what we prepare with you before the courier leaves, and why each piece matters at the arrival airport.
Where goods enter the destination country temporarily and leave again, demonstration equipment, exhibition pieces, professional gear, a carnet avoids duty entirely and gives the courier a document the officer recognises immediately. It has to be issued before departure; there is no retrospective version.
Import duty and VAT or GST in the destination country are the consignee's cost unless you have agreed otherwise in writing, and the terms should be settled before departure. It is a small conversation before the flight and an expensive one after it.
Documents that must be legalised, apostilled or attested to be valid in the destination country are checked before the courier collects them. A perfectly delivered document that lacks the right stamp has not solved anybody's problem.
The HS code decides the duty, the permits and sometimes whether the goods may enter the destination country at all. We would rather agree the classification with you before departure than watch an officer choose one for us, because the officer's choice is the one that stands.
Dry ice quantities, lithium battery watt-hours, biological substance classification and packing group all have hard limits for a passenger cabin. Some consignments to the destination country can travel exactly as they are; some need repacking; some cannot fly with a passenger at all, and we say so rather than finding out at security.
The document customs actually reads. It needs a plain description of the goods, the real value, the currency, the terms of sale and the full names and addresses of both parties. “Samples, no commercial value” is not a customs value and it is the fastest way to turn a twenty-minute clearance at the arrival airport into an afternoon.
We do not publish a price list, because a fixed table would be a lie: the same box on the same route costs differently at four hours' notice than at two days'. What we can do is be exact about which levers move the number, so nothing in the quote is a surprise.
Collection in the Emirates and delivery beyond the arrival airport are part of the job, not an extra. Where the delivery address is a long drive from the airport, or a second domestic sector is needed, we price it in from the start instead of stopping at arrivals.
A same-day turnaround, an overnight with a hotel, or a courier who continues to a third country all cost differently. On this routing the flight schedule usually decides this rather than anybody's preference.
If the routing to the destination country needs a visthe courier does not hold, either we assign a courier who does or we position one, and a global network exists precisely so that the answer is usually the first option rather than the second.
We operate around the clock, and a consignment collected at 02:00 on a Friday is a normal assignment rather than a special case. It is priced the same way as any other; what changes is which flights exist, not what we charge for our part.
Ticket, courier fee, airport transfers, the hotel where an overnight is unavoidable, the documentation work and our operations desk being awake for the whole journey. What is not included is duty and tax in the destination country, and anything you ask for after departure that changes the routing.
A direct flight is one ticket and one risk. A two-sector routing is cheaper on paper and more expensive in practice, because every connection is a chance to lose the consignment's schedule. We quote the routing we would actually fly, not the cheapest one that technically arrives.
Every quote we send is fixed before departure and contains the flight, the courier's fee, transfers and, where an overnight cannot be avoided, the hotel. The things that can change it afterwards are the things you control: a change of destination, a change of goods, or a delay at your end that costs the booked flight. Duty and tax in the destination country sit with the consignee unless we have agreed otherwise in writing.
Every operator has these problems. The difference is whether the answer was decided in advance or invented at the counter. This is our answer to each of them, written down before you need it.
A person can answer it. That single fact is most of the difference between a hand-carry and a cargo booking: a query at the arrival airport that would idle a shipment for a day gets resolved at the counter in minutes because the person who knows what is in the box is standing there.
Almost always a document problem: a passport too close to expiry, a missing transit visa, a name on the ticket that does not match the passport. Every one of those is checked at assignment, and it is checked again before the courier leaves for the airport.
Not a crisis, a routine. Before the courier leaves for the airport we already know the next two departures that could carry the consignment onward, on any carrier, from any of the seven UAE airports. Rebooking is a phone call, not a rescue operation.
We confirm the receiving party and a working phone number before the courier departs, and we agree a fallback at the destination, a second authorised person, or a secure hold, so that a delivery does not fail because someone went into a meeting.
Measured at collection, not at the gate. If it will not fit a locker we buy a seat for it there and then and tell you the revised number before the courier moves, rather than improvising at check-in.
This is why we build routings above the minimum connection time rather than at it. Where a connection is genuinely tight, the courier holds the consignment airside and takes the next available service rather than clearing into a country they were only passing through.
A dhow crossed to India on the monsoon. Today the crossing takes an afternoon, and a person still carries what matters most.The story of the Gulf
The questions clients actually ask before their first assignment, answered without marketing language.
A description of the goods, the declared value, the collection address, the delivery address and the deadline. If anything in the box is regulated, batteries, biological material, liquids, anything requiring a permit, tell us at that first message rather than later.
A vetted courier can normally be at a UAE airport within two to four hours of a confirmed booking. The real constraint is not our side, it is the next departure with a seat and a cabin allowance that fits. Because we use all seven UAE airports and buy on the open market rather than through one carrier, that next departure is usually sooner than people expect.
We rebook. Before departure we already know the next alternatives across the carriers we can lawfully use, so a cancellation costs hours rather than a day. You are told the new arrival time as soon as we have it, not after you ask.
All-risk cover on the declared value is arranged on request and confirmed in writing before collection. We do not rely on airline liability, because under the Montreal Convention that liability is a small fraction of what most courier consignments are worth.
Undeclared dangerous goods, controlled substances, weapons and weapon parts, counterfeits, unlicensed dual-use items, live animals, and anything whose parties or end use fail sanctions screening. Some regulated categories can travel with the right permit and packing; we tell you which case yours is before you pay.
Yes, and that is the point of the service. Our operations desk answers by email at bookings [at] onboardcourier [dot] ae for the whole assignment, and we contact you at collection, at departure, on arrival and at delivery without waiting to be asked.
No. That is the definition of the service rather than a policy we could relax. It travels in the cabin, in the courier's custody, for every sector of the journey. If something genuinely cannot travel in a cabin, we will tell you that and discuss freight or a charter instead of pretending.
Signature, printed name and an identification reference, with a timestamp, plus photographs where you have asked for them. It is produced by the courier at the moment of handover, not generated by a depot three hours later.
Yes. Third-country assignments, collect in one country, deliver in another, are a normal part of the work, and they are routed through the fastest connection rather than automatically through Dubai. Where a courier already in the region can take it, that is what happens.
What aviation customers ask before their first AOG job.
For a confirmed AOG job we typically have a courier airside within four hours, and on many European and Asian routes there is a departure every few hours from DXB. Message the AOG desk by email and we confirm the exact departure with the quote.
Some items are permitted as accompanied baggage under IATA dangerous goods rules and some are not. Send us the part number and the safety data sheet, and we tell you immediately whether it can be hand-carried and under which conditions.
Yes. Our desk prepares the commercial invoice, export declaration and, where applicable, ATA carnet, and briefs the courier on the arrival procedure at the destination station.
An OBC dispatch is priced per route and ticket cost. Against an aircraft losing thousands of dollars an hour in cancellations and rebooking, an OBC is typically the cheapest line in the whole AOG event.
Yes, that is the standard. The handover happens at the arrivals hall or, where airport access allows, at the line station, always against a signature.
Send the part number, weight and station by email. Our AOG desk answers within 15 minutes, 24 hours a day.
Illustrative cases, patterns from daily OBC work, details generalised for client confidentiality.
A surgical navigation unit needed before a scheduled theatre slot.
Signed originals for a company closing that could not wait for a courier network.
A prototype part for a validation rig, crated to fit the cabin allowance.
Times are typical for these lanes; every job gets its own named flight and timeline before you confirm.
Carnet, invoices, permits, prepared before the courier lands, presented in person.
Every route on this site runs because somebody was willing to get on the plane with it. We are recruiting vetted couriers worldwide: we book and pay the flight, cover transfers and a hotel where an overnight is needed, and pay a fee for every completed assignment, stated in the offer before you accept it. You decide when you are available.
An indicative calculation on the OBC-One pattern: airline seat, courier duty, hotel where the routing needs one, transfers and handling. Pick any of the airports we serve, adjust the settings, the breakdown updates as you go. Nothing here is a binding price; the airline fare on the day decides the final number.
This sends exactly what you configured above, nothing to retype, no commitment. Indicative figures only; a person confirms the real fare and timing.
From this tarmac a courier can reach six continents before tomorrow night.The geography that built Dubai
Tell us what has to move and where it has to be. You get a fixed price and a departure time back, usually within 15 minutes, day or night.
Answered by a person, 24/7. No commitment. One form, one reply.
Book hand-carry delivery from the UAE to anywhere in the world, and follow it in real time. Same-day departure available.
Book a shipment → Client loginWe pay the ticket and a fee per completed assignment. You choose when you are available.
Apply as an OBC → See the open positionAOG courier Dubai, the part flies with a person, not a pallet. is one chapter of a larger network. OnBoard Courier moves time-critical consignments with vetted on-board couriers departing 24/7 from all seven UAE airports to 584 destinations across 219 countries. Choose the service that fits, classic hand-carry, AOG for grounded aircraft, medical and pharma, next flight out or high-value goods, then check entry requirements and customs by country and how an assignment actually runs, minute by minute.
Prefer to compare first? Read when a seat beats a parcel network, browse the industries we move for or scan the airlines the couriers the desk places fly with. If you travel often yourself, flying as an OnBoard Courier pays per completed assignment. For anything urgent, the fastest route is the quote form above, answered by a person, day or night.
Continue the route
Hand-picked next stops, every card is a live page, not a promise.
Same courier, same cabin, different amount of ground work. The desk recommends one of these in the quote and prices the other two if you ask.
Best when both ends have people who can reach an airport.
Price this for your consignmentThe full chain, one price, one person answerable for it.
Price this for your consignmentFor deadlines that a scheduled seat cannot reach.
Price this for your consignmentEvery option is quoted as one all-in figure with a named flight. Nothing on this page is a rate card.
A firm quote within 15 minutes, 24/7. One courier, one price, a signature at the door.