The OnBoard Courier for Brazil

After it come São Paulo (CGH) with 42 destinations and about 268.5 departures a day, Rio de Janeiro (GIG) with 52 destinations and about 167.7 departures a day, Brasília (BSB) with 45 destinations and about 146 departures a day, Recife (REC) with 37 destinations and about 86 departures a day and Fortaleza (FOR) with 25 destinations and about 77.7 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 13 airports in Brazil that publish departures schedule about 1,599 movements a day and reach 431 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 GRU alone, 1,455 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 111 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.

87 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 91 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 Argentina, about 38.8 flights a day, Chile, about 25.9 flights a day, the United States, about 23.9 flights a day, Portugal, about 14.3 flights a day and Panama, about 13.9 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Brazil without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Brazil to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

41 airlines fly out of Brazil in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Gol on 209 routes, LATAM on 196 routes, Azul on 131 routes, LATAM Brasil on 129 routes and TAP Air Portugal on 13 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 GRU in this data runs to Dubai, United Arab Emirates (DXB), 12,217 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.

Hand carry demand is not spread evenly across a country, it sits where something expensive stops when a part is missing. The industrial geography file behind this site records 1 such site in Brazil, across aerospace: Embraer at Sao Jose dos Campos. These are public manufacturing and research sites, named as the reason a lane exists. Nothing here says any of them is a customer of any courier operator.

Take the first of them. Embraer at Sao Jose dos Campos: Commercial and executive jet assembly. A Brazilian line supplied largely from Europe and North America. That is the shape of the work in Brazil, and it is why the airports above matter more than the distance does.

Counting what is already published, this site holds 8 city pages, 4 standalone city pages, 12 Atlas entries, 2 airport pages and 7 lane pages for Brazil, 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, the entry and formalities guide, the travel and connections page and the courier recruitment page for people who already fly this market. The country page sells, the city pages answer, and the lane pages price. They are kept apart because a reader arrives at exactly one of those three questions and merging them would bury the other two.