Every hand carry starts with the same four questions, and for years we answered them by hand with a schedule, a map and a clock. The route calculator answers them in about a second, for 3,083 airports and 38,042 scheduled pairs, and we left it open to everybody including the operators we compete with.
Published 2026-09-07 · 8 min read · OnBoard Courier, Dubai
A shipper rarely asks for a routing. They ask whether the thing can be there by Thursday morning. Underneath that sit four questions, always the same four, and a desk answers them in order.
Can it be flown at all today. There is either a scheduled service between those two airports or there is not, and if there is not, the question becomes whether one change can be made to hold. Through where. A connection is not a detail, it is the part of the job most likely to fail, so the transit airport and the time on the ground there decide whether a routing is real. When does it land, in local time at the far end. Not flight time, landing time, because the consignee works to their own clock. And what has to happen on the ground at both ends before and after the aircraft moves, which is where most of the hours actually go.
The last one surprises people. On a typical intercontinental hand carry the aircraft is in the air for seven hours and the job takes fourteen. Collection, an export declaration, a manual check in, arrival formalities in person at the counter and the delivery run account for the rest. A quote that only counts flying time is a quote that will be late.
The line between the two matters, so the tool draws it on every sheet rather than hiding it. Distances are computed: great circle between published coordinates, exact as a great circle. The scheduled network is real data, refreshed periodically, with the date it was checked printed under the title. The departures board underneath a result is genuinely live: actual flights with terminal, gate where published and aircraft type, read on demand and cached for half an hour.
Block times are estimated and the sheet says so on every leg. The model is published rather than hidden: a flown track is taken as six per cent longer than the great circle, cruise as 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. Connection time at a transit airport scales with how large that airport is, from an hour at a small field to ninety minutes at a major hub, because a wide body arriving at a terminal you then have to leave and re-enter is not a forty minute walk.
The ground times are yours to change. Ninety minutes for collection, three hours at the airport before departure, ninety minutes for arrival formalities and forty five for the delivery run are our defaults, and they are defaults because they are what this desk sees. Three hours before departure is not caution: an export declaration and a manual check in for a consignment that is not ordinary baggage take longer than a boarding pass.
Two things quietly ruin routings and neither shows up in a schedule search. The first is the night restriction. Frankfurt, Zurich, Sydney and a number of other airports refuse movements inside a defined window, and a routing whose computed arrival falls inside one is not a routing, it is a diversion waiting to happen. We hold the windows for the airports that have them and the calculator will hide the routings that fall inside them if you ask it to.
The second is the duty day. A courier is a person. A routing that has them collecting at five in the morning and signing at midnight is legal on paper and unreliable in practice, so anything over sixteen hours from collection to signature is flagged rather than quietly offered.
There is also a deadline calculation, which is the one dispatchers use most. Give it the time the consignment has to be there and it works backwards: the latest moment collection can still happen, and how much slack is left. A negative number is an honest answer and a great deal more useful than a routing that looks fine until somebody adds up the hours.
Because a reference only one desk can read is not a reference. We built it for our own dispatchers, and the cost of publishing it is a server. What we get back is that the numbers people check the industry against are ours. There is no account, no key, no form in front of the result and no quiet degradation after a number of searches. Those tricks buy a handful of addresses and cost the credibility that made anybody open the page.
It answers identically whether you are a client, a freight forwarder pricing a job for somebody else, or a competing courier operator working out whether to bid. If you want it on your own site, two lines of HTML put it there, and the frame carries our mark and a link back. That is the entire licence fee.
Open the route calculator and type two cities. If a city has several airports, pick the city itself and the tool takes whichever field actually flies, which is the difference between an answer and an empty screen at places like Medellín or Milan. Every airport also has its own page in the atlas, with the full destination network, the one connection reach and the alternates within a road transfer, and every lane we publish is drawn on one map.
If you would rather have the routing done than calculated, that is what the desk is for, and it answers with a flight and a price in about fifteen minutes.
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.
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Apply as an OBC → See the open positionFive short questions. A dispatcher replies with a named departure, the delivery hour and one fixed price, day and night.
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