The OnBoard Courier for Colombia

After it come Rionegro (MDE) with 39 destinations and about 158.7 departures a day, Santiago de Cali (CLO) with 29 destinations and about 83.6 departures a day and Cartagena de Indias (CTG) with 19 destinations and about 75.7 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 4 airports in Colombia that publish departures schedule about 856.2 movements a day and reach 189 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 BOG alone, 1,177 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 102 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.

72 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 47 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 55 flights a day, Panama, about 39.2 flights a day, Mexico, about 19.3 flights a day, the Dominican Republic, about 13.9 flights a day and Spain, about 13.4 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Colombia without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Colombia to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

41 airlines fly out of Colombia in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Avianca on 118 routes, Gol on 37 routes, Copa Airlines Colombia on 35 routes, LATAM on 31 routes and SATENA on 31 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 BOG in this data runs to Haycock, United States (HAY), 9,394 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 Colombia without a change. The best connection it holds runs Abu Dhabi to Madrid and then Madrid to Bogotá (BOG), and the weaker of the two legs, the one that decides whether the connection actually holds, runs about 2.7 times a day. The alternatives are Rionegro via New York, about 2 a day on the weaker leg, Santiago de Cali via Madrid, about 1.1 a day on the weaker leg and Cartagena de Indias via New York, about 1.1 a day on the weaker leg.

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 7 city pages, 2 standalone city pages, 4 Atlas entries, 1 airport page and 3 lane pages for Colombia, 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.