The OnBoard Courier for The Bahamas

The scheduled network file behind this site holds departure data for one airport in The Bahamas. The largest is Nassau Lynden Pindling (NAS), the airport at Nassau, with 53 scheduled destinations in 13 countries flown by 20 airlines and about 88 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 NAS alone, 944 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 53 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.

41 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 13 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 the United States, about 41.9 flights a day, Canada, about 2.7 flights a day, the Turks and Caicos Islands, about 2 flights a day, the United Kingdom, about 1.1 flights a day and Panama, about 1.1 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from The Bahamas without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from The Bahamas to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

20 airlines fly out of The Bahamas in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Bahamasair on 16 routes, Tradewind Aviation on 4 routes, American Airlines on 4 routes, JetBlue Airways on 3 routes and United Airlines on 3 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 NAS in this data runs to Brussels, Belgium (BRU), 7,327 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 The Bahamas without a change. The best connection it holds runs Dubai to New York and then New York to Nassau (NAS), and the weaker of the two legs, the one that decides whether the connection actually holds, runs about 2.4 times a day. The alternatives are Freeport via Miami, about 1 a day on the weaker leg, Marsh Harbour via Miami, about 1 a day on the weaker leg and George Town via Miami, about 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.