The OnBoard Courier for Angola

The scheduled network file behind this site holds departure data for one airport in Angola. The largest is Luanda Dr. António Agostinho Neto (NBJ), the airport at Luanda, with 29 scheduled destinations in 21 countries flown by 12 airlines and about 22.3 departures a day. That single airport carries 100 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country, which is the first thing a desk needs to know: there is no realistic second gateway, so a cancellation there is a lost day.

Reach matters more than frequency for a hand carry, because a courier flies whatever is leaving. From NBJ alone, 792 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 29 served nonstop. A gateway that multiplies its own reach that far with one change is a hub in the useful sense: almost anywhere is two boarding passes away. It is computed from the scheduled network rather than from a booking engine.

19 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 7 domestic destinations. That matters on a hand carry because it decides whether the last leg can be flown or has to be driven. A consignee outside the gateway city is then a connecting flight, not a four hour drive.

Outside its own borders the country is tied most closely to South Africa, about 4.4 flights a day, Portugal, about 3.7 flights a day, Ethiopia, about 1.1 flights a day, Nigeria, about 1 flight a day and the United Arab Emirates, about 0.9 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Angola without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Angola to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

12 airlines fly out of Angola in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to TAAG on 19 routes, TAP Air Portugal on 2 routes, Air Algerie on 2 routes, ASKY on 2 routes and South African Airlink on 1 route. The carrier matters to a hand carry more than it does to freight, because cabin baggage rules, what counts as an acceptable carry on item and whether an extra seat can be bought are set by the airline and not by the airport.

The longest single sector out of NBJ in this data runs to Guangzhou, China (CAN), 11,399 km by great circle. Great circle is not a flown distance and will read short against a real routing, but it is the honest way to state a reach: it says what one aircraft does without stopping, which is exactly the question a courier desk is asking.

Counting what is already published, this site holds 2 standalone city pages, 1 Atlas entry and 1 lane page for Angola, and every one of them is linked from this page. That is the point of a country index: the material exists, it was written one page at a time, and until now there was no single place that connected it.

Alongside the reference material there is the country desk page and the courier recruitment page for people who already fly this market. The coverage here is thin, and saying so is more useful than padding it. What exists is accurate; what is missing is missing because nothing on this desk has been written about it yet.