Route calculator
Where can it fly, through where, and when does it land.
The most complete route calculator for on board couriers, and beyond: built by a desk that knows what a missed connection costs.
The four questions a hand carry desk answers before it quotes, answered in about a second, with the transit shown as its own line and the real departures underneath. Open to every operator. No account.
Loading the network
Restrictions
Three hours at the airport because an export declaration and a manual check in take longer than a boarding pass. Ninety minutes on arrival because the courier clears in person at the counter. Forty five minutes for the delivery run assumes the consignee is in the city, not across it.
An OBC route calculator, built by a courier desk
Search for a hand carry route planner and what comes back is a passenger fare search or nothing. A fare engine sells a seat; it does not tell you whether the export step fits before the last departure, how long the transit is against the planning minimum, or what day the consignment is signed for in the consignee’s own clock. This does, and it is free.
What it does
Ten things a dispatcher needs before quoting, answered in about a second.
- 01Nonstop, or the best single connection. Every scheduled pair in the network, with the airlines that fly it and how often. Connections ranked by the weaker leg, which is the one that decides the day.
- 02A stopover of your choosing. Type a hub into the Via field and the calculator routes through it, or tells you plainly that nothing connects there.
- 03Transit as its own line. Arrival at the hub, the minimum on the ground, and the earliest the next leg can leave, in the hub’s own time.
- 04Door to door, not gate to gate. Collection, the export step, the flying, the transit, clearance and the delivery run, each adjustable.
- 05Live departures on the pair. Actual scheduled flights in the next twelve hours with terminal, gate and aircraft type, with cargo only flights hidden unless asked for.
- 06Operating restrictions where they bite. Night curfews at Frankfurt, Zurich or Sydney and the annual closure at Bali, shown for every airport the routing touches.
- 07Sent, not screenshotted. The quote form, Telegram, email, a link that reproduces the result, a print view, and on a phone the system share sheet.
- 08Planned backwards from the deadline. Enter when the consignee needs it and every routing is checked against it, with the latest collection time at origin printed on the sheet. It is the question the desk is actually asked.
- 09Curfews and closures checked against your times. A departure computed inside the Frankfurt night ban or an arrival inside the Sydney curfew is flagged on the leg, not left for you to notice at the gate.
- 10A duty day, not just a flight. Beyond sixteen hours door to door the sheet says so, because a courier who has been awake for twenty is a risk to the consignment.
General route planners such as Onfleet, Routific or Locus optimise vans on roads. A fare engine sells a seat. Neither knows what a hand carry is. This does, and it prints only when you ask it to: a routing is a thing you send, not a thing you file.
Reading the sheet
Every figure on it, what produced it, and how far to trust it. Nothing in the calculator is a black box.
- Distance
computed - Great circle between published coordinates. Exact as a great circle; a flown track is always longer, so the time model adds six per cent before it converts.
- Block time
estimated - Cruise taken at 720 km/h below 800 km, 830 up to 3,000 km and 880 above, plus thirty minutes on the ground for taxi at both ends. Within a few minutes of a real timetable on most sectors. Never quote it as a schedule.
- Flights a day
measured - The scheduled average on that pair. Reliable as a measure of how well served a pair is, and an average: a pair at 0.4 a day may run three times one week and not at all the next.
- Transit
planning figure - 60, 75 or 90 minutes by how many destinations the hub serves. Deliberately conservative, and not any airline’s published minimum connecting time. On a hand carry, generous is cheap and tight is not.
- Door to door
your figures - Your ground timings plus the flying plus the transit. As good as the timings you gave it. The defaults suit a European or Gulf departure and are optimistic where the export step is slow.
- Times on the sheet
computed - Real time zone arithmetic from the departure you enter, daylight saving included, each time shown in that airport’s own clock. The day shift in the last line is worth reading twice.
- Departures board
live - Actual scheduled flights on the pair in the next twelve hours, with terminal, gate where published and aircraft type. This one is a timetable, not an estimate. Cached for up to thirty minutes.
How a hand carry routing is actually planned
A routing for a passenger is a seat and a time. A routing for a hand carry is a chain of custody with a clock running through it, and the desk works it backwards from the far end.
- deadlineThe consignee needs it in handIn their own time zone, on which day. Everything else is worked backwards from this moment.
- 30 to 90 minThe delivery runFrom the arrival airport to the plant, the laboratory or the hangar.
- 60 to 90 minCustoms, in personOn most commercial consignments the officer wants to see the paperwork and the person carrying it.
- block timeThe last sectorEstimated from distance on the sheet, replaced by a flight number from the departures board.
- 60 to 90 minThe minimum at the hubSet generously: a missed connection on a hand carry is not a later flight, it is a lost day.
- block timeThe first sectorRanked with the connection by the weaker leg, which decides whether the day holds.
- 3 hAt the departure airportAn export declaration and a manual check in take time that a passenger never sees.
- the answerThe latest collection timeThe one number the client actually needs to hear: the latest moment the courier can be at the shipper’s door.
Most of what makes this hard is not the flying, it is the geography around it. The world’s industrial pairs are not its well served pairs: Hamburg to Toulouse, the two largest Airbus sites, has no nonstop; Stuttgart to Spartanburg, two of the largest car plants in one group, has none either. The connection decides the job, and the weaker of its two legs decides the connection.
Then there are the windows nobody thinks about until they close. Frankfurt does not move aircraft between eleven at night and five in the morning, Sydney closes at eleven, Bali closes for a day every spring for Nyepi. A departure computed at 23:40 in Frankfurt is not a departure, and a calculator that prints it without a flag is worse than no calculator.
Finally the courier is a person. A duty day past sixteen hours needs a rest at the hub or a second courier at the far end, and a plan that ignores that ends with a tired stranger holding something worth more than the aircraft.
That is what this tool does, in the order the desk does it. We built it because our own dispatchers needed it at three in the morning, and we left it open because a reference only one operator can read is not a reference. Use it for a routing we will never see. The desk is here when the routing needs a courier on it.
Three questions this was built to answer
Not hypotheticals. These are the three shapes almost every hand carry enquiry arrives in, in the order a dispatcher works through them.
Can it be there tomorrow morning?
Somebody has a deadline and no idea whether it is physically possible. Put the two airports in, set the departure to the earliest a courier could realistically be at the gate, and read the last line of the sheet. It gives the day as well as the time: a nine hour flight going east can land two calendar days later, and a nine hour flight going west can land before it took off.
There is no nonstop. Now what?
Most industrial pairs have no direct service, which is exactly why couriers exist. The connections are ranked by how often the weaker of the two legs runs, because that is the leg that decides whether the day holds. A hub with six flights a day into it and one out is not a connection, it is an overnight.
What do I tell the client the total is?
The door to door figure adds the parts that are not flying: getting to the airport, the export step, the connection, clearing at the far end, the delivery run. On a short European sector those parts are usually larger than the flight, which is the most common surprise for anybody quoting hand carry for the first time.
What it does not know
Being clear about the edges is what makes the rest usable.
- No fares and no seat availability. A route it shows can be sold out, and a seat is not a booking.
- Not whether the goods may travel. Cabin carriage depends on the airline, the aircraft, security rules and what is in the box. Lithium cells, samples and anything under export control are decided before a seat is held, not here.
- Not who is carrying. A routing through a third country can need a transit visa the courier does not hold.
- A snapshot, not a feed. A summer route shows in winter until the next refresh, which is why the line under the title carries its date.
- No two connection routings. On a hand carry those are built against a specific consignment, by a person.
Questions
01Is the calculator free, and is there a catch?
It is free, there is no account and there is no key. The catch, if it is one, is that we are a hand carry operator and we would rather you knew us. The tool answers the same way whether you use us or not, and it is deliberately useful to competing operators, because a reference only one desk can read is not worth maintaining.
02Are the flight times real schedules?
The block times on the itinerary are estimates computed from distance, and the sheet says so on every leg. The departures board underneath is real: actual scheduled flights with terminal, gate where published and aircraft type, read live and cached for half an hour. The two are kept apart on purpose so nobody quotes an estimate as a timetable.
03Why does it only offer one connection?
Because a second connection changes the nature of the job. Two changes on a hand carry means two chances to lose the consignment and a duty day that usually will not fit, so those routings are built by hand against a specific consignment rather than generated. If the calculator finds nothing with one change, that is the honest answer and the desk takes it from there.
04Can I use it on a phone, and can I send the result to somebody?
Yes. The mask stacks on a phone and the itinerary reads top to bottom. Every result has a link that reproduces it, a print view, an email button that carries the itinerary as text, and on a phone the system share sheet. The tool is one file with one data source behind it, which is what lets it live inside the courier portal and be wrapped as an app.
05How current is the network data?
The scheduled network is refreshed periodically and the line under the title carries the date it was checked. Route networks move slowly, a handful of changes a season on most airports, so a figure a few weeks old is still a good planning figure. Live departures are current to within thirty minutes.
06Can I use these numbers in a quotation to my own client?
Use the distances and the routings, they are computed and they are stable. Do not paste a block time into a contract: it is a planning estimate, not a published schedule, and a real timetable will differ by a few minutes either way. For a firm time you need the actual flight, which is what the departures board underneath gives you.
07Why is my airport missing?
The calculator can route out of the airports whose outbound network we hold. Everything else appears as a destination but not as a starting point, so a pair can come back empty because one end is not covered rather than because it cannot be flown. Tell us which airport and we will add it on the next refresh.