The OnBoard Courier for Bulgaria

After it come Burgas (BOJ) with 52 destinations and about 37.4 departures a day and Varna (VAR) with 45 destinations and about 32.3 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 3 airports in Bulgaria that publish departures schedule about 176.7 movements a day and reach 192 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 SOF alone, 774 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 95 served nonstop. That is a normal spread for a well connected gateway, and it means a routing exists for most requests without waiting for a specific weekly service. It is computed from the scheduled network rather than from a booking engine.

6 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 4 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 away from the gateway is a road leg, and the road leg is where the hours go.

Outside its own borders the country is tied most closely to Germany, about 30.6 flights a day, Italy, about 16.6 flights a day, Poland, about 14.6 flights a day, the United Kingdom, about 14 flights a day and Spain, about 10.3 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Bulgaria without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Bulgaria to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

44 airlines fly out of Bulgaria in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Wizz Air on 58 routes, Ryanair on 56 routes, Bulgaria Air on 33 routes, SmartWings on 10 routes and Jet2 on 10 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 SOF in this data runs to Cincinnati, United States (CVG), 8,397 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 3 Atlas entries and 1 airport page for Bulgaria, 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.