The OnBoard Courier for Gabon

After it come Port Gentil (POG) with 1 destinations and about 5.3 departures a day. That is the only alternate, so the rebooking options are thin. Between them the 2 airports in Gabon that publish departures schedule about 27.9 movements a day and reach 21 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 LBV alone, 414 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 20 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.

47 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 4 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 away from the gateway is a road leg, and the road leg is where the hours go.

Outside its own borders the country is tied most closely to Cameroon, about 4.1 flights a day, the Republic of the Congo, about 1.9 flights a day, Nigeria, about 1.8 flights a day, Benin, about 1.6 flights a day and Togo, about 1.1 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Gabon without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Gabon to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

10 airlines fly out of Gabon in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Afrijet on 16 routes, ASKY on 3 routes, Air Algerie on 2 routes, Camair-Co on 2 routes and Air Cote D'Ivoire on 2 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 LBV in this data runs to Paris, France (CDG), 5,439 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 Gabon without a change. The best connection it holds runs Dubai to Paris and then Paris to Libreville (LBV), and the weaker of the two legs, the one that decides whether the connection actually holds, runs about 1.1 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.