The OnBoard Courier for Canada

After it come Vancouver (YVR) with 125 destinations and about 409.9 departures a day, Calgary (YYC) with 105 destinations and about 319.5 departures a day, Montreal (YUL) with 157 destinations and about 317.8 departures a day, Ottawa (YOW) with 45 destinations and about 123.1 departures a day and Halifax (YHZ) with 48 destinations and about 101.6 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 10 airports in Canada that publish departures schedule about 2,148.4 movements a day and reach 823 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 YYZ alone, 1,985 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 198 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.

61 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 106 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 525.6 flights a day, Mexico, about 28.4 flights a day, the United Kingdom, about 28.4 flights a day, France, about 27.3 flights a day and Germany, about 19.3 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Canada without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Canada to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

100 airlines fly out of Canada in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Air Canada on 328 routes, WestJet on 226 routes, Porter Airlines on 81 routes, Air Transat on 69 routes and Flair Airlines on 52 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 YYZ in this data runs to Manila, Philippines (MNL), 13,213 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.

From the Emirates, Canada is reached nonstop. The network file records 3 such pairs, of which 2 run often enough to plan around: Dubai to Toronto (YYZ), about 1.1 a day on Emirates and Dubai to Montreal (YUL), about 1.1 a day on Emirates. More than one nonstop pair means more than one chance to travel on the day the consignment is ready, which is worth more on this kind of work than any single fast flight.

The only carrier on that sector is Emirates. With one carrier there is no choice to make and no fallback to fall back on, so the booking is made early and the alternative is a connection rather than a different airline.

This site publishes 10 lane pages that cross the border of Canada. Leaving Canada: Toronto to Frankfurt, Toronto to Mexico City and Vancouver to Tokyo. Arriving: Abu Dhabi to Toronto, Dubai to Montreal, Dubai to Toronto, Dubai to Vancouver, Hong Kong to Vancouver, Shanghai to Vancouver and Tokyo to Vancouver.

Each of those has its own page with the flying time, the gateway pair and what actually moves on it. Read together they say something the individual pages do not: the places Canada is connected to on this desk are Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, Frankfurt and Mexico City. A lane page exists because the traffic on it is real, not because the pair looked plausible on a map.

Counting what is already published, this site holds 20 city pages, 8 standalone city pages, 10 Atlas entries, 3 airport pages, 10 lane pages and 8 trade and history pages for Canada, 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 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.