The OnBoard Courier for France

After it come Paris (ORY) with 157 destinations and about 361.7 departures a day, Nice (NCE) with 116 destinations and about 207 departures a day, Marseille (MRS) with 117 destinations and about 158 departures a day, Lyon (LYS) with 122 destinations and about 152.8 departures a day and Bâle/Mulhouse (BSL) with 122 destinations and about 125.1 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 France that publish departures schedule about 2,072.8 movements a day and reach 1,207 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 CDG alone, 2,085 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 277 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.

20 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 38 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 Spain, about 207.5 flights a day, Italy, about 153.1 flights a day, Germany, about 119.9 flights a day, the United Kingdom, about 119.7 flights a day and Morocco, about 108.5 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from France without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from France to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

153 airlines fly out of France in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to easyJet on 309 routes, Transavia France on 207 routes, Air France on 199 routes, Volotea on 165 routes and Ryanair on 103 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 CDG in this data runs to Santiago, Chile (SCL), 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.

From the Emirates, France is reached nonstop. The network file records 4 such pairs: Dubai to Paris (CDG), about 3.6 a day on Air France and Emirates, Dubai to Nice (NCE), about 1.1 a day on Emirates, Dubai to Lyon (LYS), about 1.1 a day on Emirates and Jebel Ali to Paris (LBG), about 0.3 a day. 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 Air France and Emirates. 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.

France runs 2h behind Dubai. That is why the departure chosen matters more than the flight time: the same sector can land inside the consignee's working day or an hour after it closed, depending on which bank the courier makes. An offset this small is forgiving: almost any morning departure still arrives inside the working day at the other end, and the desk plans around the airport rather than around the clock.

Night restrictions are recorded for CDG, ORY and BSL: CDG between 00:00 and 05:00 local, ORY between 23:30 and 06:00 local and BSL between 23:00 and 06:00 local. A late evening departure that slips past the start of one of those windows does not go until the morning, which on an urgent consignment is not a delay of an hour but of a working day. Those hours apply to scheduled movements, exemptions and seasonal variations exist, and the desk checks them against the airport and the carrier before it books rather than relying on the list.

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 6 such sites in France, across aerospace, automotive and semiconductor: Airbus at Toulouse Blagnac, Airbus at Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, Airbus Helicopters at Marignane, Safran at Villaroche and Corbeil, Renault at Flins and Douai and STMicroelectronics at Crolles, Grenoble. 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 Toulouse Blagnac: Final assembly for the A320, A330 and A350 families, and the group head office. An assembly line that stops waits for one part, and Toulouse is where the aircraft is standing. That is the shape of the work in France, and it is why the airports above matter more than the distance does.

This site publishes 12 lane pages that cross the border of France. Leaving France: Paris to Abu Dhabi, Paris to Casablanca, Paris to Mexico City, Paris to Sao Paulo, Paris to Shanghai and Paris to Tokyo. Arriving: Abu Dhabi to Paris, Casablanca to Toulouse, Doha to Paris, Dubai to Paris, Dubai to Toulouse and Queretaro to Toulouse.

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 France is connected to on this desk are Abu Dhabi, Casablanca, Doha, Dubai, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Tokyo and Queretaro. 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 26 city pages, 8 standalone city pages, 10 Atlas entries, 2 airport pages, 12 lane pages and 8 trade and history pages for France, 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. This is one of the most heavily covered markets on the site, and the depth is the point: a shipper in a particular city with a particular part does not want a country page, they want their own.