The OnBoard Courier for Chile

After it come Puerto Montt (PMC) with 4 destinations and about 21.1 departures a day and Iquique (IQQ) with 4 destinations and about 14.9 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 Chile that publish departures schedule about 252.5 movements a day and reach 63 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 SCL alone, 916 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 55 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.

64 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 17 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 28.7 flights a day, Argentina, about 17.6 flights a day, Peru, about 8.6 flights a day, Colombia, about 6.9 flights a day and Panama, about 6.1 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Chile without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Chile to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

16 airlines fly out of Chile in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to LATAM on 49 routes, Sky Airline on 27 routes, JetSMART on 19 routes, BoA on 2 routes and Turkish Airlines on 1 route. 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 SCL in this data runs to Paris, France (CDG), 11,673 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 Chile without a change. The best connection it holds runs Abu Dhabi to Madrid and then Madrid to Santiago (SCL), and the weaker of the two legs, the one that decides whether the connection actually holds, runs about 2.7 times a day. There is no second routing in the file worth naming, so this one is planned with a spare day in it.

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 2 city pages, 2 standalone city pages, 3 Atlas entries and 1 lane page for Chile, 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.