The OnBoard Courier for Argentina

After it come Buenos Aires (EZE) with 58 destinations and about 109.4 departures a day, Córdoba (COR) with 21 destinations and about 34.7 departures a day and Mendoza (MDZ) with 12 destinations and about 24 departures a day. Those are the alternates. When the primary gateway is shut by weather, a strike or a curfew, they are what a courier is rebooked through. Between them the 4 airports in Argentina that publish departures schedule about 378.2 movements a day and reach 148 separate destinations, counting each city once per airport.

Reach matters more than frequency for a hand carry, because a courier flies whatever is leaving. From AEP alone, 214 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 57 served nonstop. The multiplier is modest, which tells a desk that the nonstop list is doing most of the work here and that a missed departure is expensive. It is computed from the scheduled network rather than from a booking engine.

60 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 39 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 Brazil, about 47.6 flights a day, Chile, about 24.4 flights a day, Peru, about 12.9 flights a day, Panama, about 11.6 flights a day and Spain, about 11.1 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Argentina without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Argentina to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

40 airlines fly out of Argentina in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Aerolineas Argentinas on 98 routes, JetSMART on 35 routes, Flybondi on 17 routes, Gol on 15 routes and LATAM on 7 routes. 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 AEP in this data runs to Bogotá, Colombia (BOG), 4,666 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.

Nothing in the network file leaves an Emirates airport for Argentina without a change. The best connection it holds runs Dubai to Barcelona and then Barcelona to Buenos Aires (EZE), and the weaker of the two legs, the one that decides whether the connection actually holds, runs about 2.7 times a day. The alternatives are Buenos Aires via Rio de Janeiro, about 1.1 a day on the weaker leg, Córdoba via São Paulo, about 1.1 a day on the weaker leg and Mendoza via São Paulo, about 1.1 a day on the weaker leg.

A connection is not a defect on this kind of work, it is the normal case, and it changes only one thing: the courier stays with the consignment through the transfer rather than handing it to anyone. Baggage is not checked through, the item does not enter a transit shed, and the chain of custody survives the change of aircraft because the same person carries it onto the second one.

Counting what is already published, this site holds 3 city pages, 2 standalone city pages, 4 Atlas entries and 2 lane pages for Argentina, 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.