The OnBoard Courier for China

After it come Shanghai (PVG) with 206 destinations and about 786.7 departures a day, Beijing (PEK) with 201 destinations and about 651.4 departures a day, Shenzhen (SZX) with 157 destinations and about 574.7 departures a day, Beijing (PKX) with 159 destinations and about 553.7 departures a day and Xianyang (XIY) with 147 destinations and about 533.4 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 23 airports in China that publish departures schedule about 9,242.6 movements a day and reach 2,731 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 CAN alone, 1,515 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.

88 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 215 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 South Korea, about 130.8 flights a day, Thailand, about 103.4 flights a day, Hong Kong, about 101 flights a day, Malaysia, about 91.3 flights a day and Japan, about 83.3 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from China without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from China to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

153 airlines fly out of China in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to China Eastern Airlines on 719 routes, China Southern Airlines on 627 routes, Air China on 575 routes, Hainan Airlines on 369 routes and Sichuan Airlines on 310 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 CAN in this data runs to New York, United States (JFK), 12,857 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, China is reached nonstop. The network file records 7 such pairs: Dubai to Shanghai (PVG), about 2.3 a day on Emirates, Dubai to Beijing (PEK), about 2.3 a day on Emirates, Dubai to Guangzhou (CAN), about 1.1 a day on China Southern Airlines and Emirates, Dubai to Shenzhen (SZX), about 1.1 a day on Emirates and Dubai to Hangzhou (HGH), 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 carriers on those sectors are Emirates, China Southern Airlines and Etihad Airways. With this few, the desk knows all of their cabin rules by heart, which is the difference between quoting in fifteen minutes and quoting after a phone call.

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 China, across aerospace: Airbus at Tianjin. 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. Airbus at Tianjin: A320 family final assembly and A350 completion. The longest supply line Airbus runs, and the one most exposed to a missing part. That is the shape of the work in China, and it is why the airports above matter more than the distance does.

This site publishes 21 lane pages that cross the border of China. Leaving China: Shanghai to Budapest, Shanghai to Frankfurt, Shanghai to Guadalajara, Shanghai to Istanbul, Shanghai to Los Angeles, Shanghai to Singapore and Shanghai to Vancouver. Arriving: Abu Dhabi to Shanghai, Copenhagen to Shanghai, Dubai to Beijing, Dubai to Guangzhou, Dubai to Shanghai, Dubai to Shenzhen, Frankfurt to Shanghai and Istanbul to Shanghai.

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 China is connected to on this desk are Abu Dhabi, Copenhagen, Dubai, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Munich, Paris, Seoul, Budapest and Guadalajara, plus 5 more. 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 10 city pages, 16 standalone city pages, 23 Atlas entries, 4 airport pages, 21 lane pages and 8 trade and history pages for China, 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 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.