The OnBoard Courier for Ireland

After it come Cork (ORK) with 39 destinations and about 31.2 departures a day and Limerick city (SNN) with 37 destinations and about 28.7 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 3 airports in Ireland that publish departures schedule about 522 movements a day and reach 274 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 DUB alone, 1,620 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.

1 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 2 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 the United Kingdom, about 179.3 flights a day, Spain, about 66.9 flights a day, the United States, about 48.3 flights a day, France, about 31.4 flights a day and Italy, about 26.6 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Ireland without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Ireland to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

51 airlines fly out of Ireland in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Ryanair on 172 routes, Aer Lingus on 105 routes, Delta Air Lines on 6 routes, EAT Leipzig on 5 routes and United Airlines on 5 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 DUB in this data runs to Guangzhou, China (CAN), 9,696 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.

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 3 such sites in Ireland, across semiconductor and pharma: Intel at Leixlip, Pfizer at Ringaskiddy and Grange Castle and MSD at Carlow and Ballydine. 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. Intel at Leixlip: Wafer fabrication in Europe. Ireland's fab, supplied from across Europe and the United States. That is the shape of the work in Ireland, and it is why the airports above matter more than the distance does.

Counting what is already published, this site holds 12 city pages, 2 standalone city pages, 3 Atlas entries, 1 airport page, 3 lane pages and 8 trade and history pages for Ireland, 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.