The OnBoard Courier for Jamaica

After it come Kingston (KIN) with 17 destinations and about 23.7 departures a day. That is the only alternate, so the rebooking options are thin. Between them the 2 airports in Jamaica that publish departures schedule about 54.7 movements a day and reach 42 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 MBJ alone, 1,024 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 25 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.

0 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 0 domestic destinations. With no domestic network at all, everything past the gateway is a road move. 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 States, about 38 flights a day, Canada, about 4.8 flights a day, Panama, about 2.4 flights a day, the Cayman Islands, about 1.7 flights a day and the Turks and Caicos Islands, about 1.4 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Jamaica without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Jamaica to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

24 airlines fly out of Jamaica in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to JetBlue Airways on 6 routes, American Airlines on 6 routes, Caribbean Airlines on 6 routes, United Airlines on 4 routes and Delta Air Lines on 3 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 MBJ in this data runs to Milan, Italy (MXP), 8,294 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 Jamaica without a change. The best connection it holds runs Dubai to New York and then New York to Montego Bay (MBJ), and the weaker of the two legs, the one that decides whether the connection actually holds, runs about 2.4 times a day. The alternatives are Kingston via New York, about 2.4 a day on the weaker leg and Ocho Rios via Miami, about 0.3 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.