The OnBoard Courier for Malaysia

After it come Kota Kinabalu (BKI) with 30 destinations and about 102.5 departures a day, Penang (PEN) with 27 destinations and about 100.1 departures a day and Kuching (KCH) with 17 destinations and about 63.4 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 Malaysia that publish departures schedule about 858.7 movements a day and reach 211 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 KUL alone, 1,151 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 137 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.

41 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 23 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 China, about 102.5 flights a day, Indonesia, about 87 flights a day, Singapore, about 65.9 flights a day, Thailand, about 39 flights a day and India, about 30.9 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Malaysia without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Malaysia to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

79 airlines fly out of Malaysia in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to AirAsia on 98 routes, Malaysia Airlines on 74 routes, Malindo Air on 60 routes, AirAsia X on 17 routes and Firefly on 16 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 KUL in this data runs to London, United Kingdom (LHR), 10,605 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.

Counting what is already published, this site holds 8 city pages, 4 standalone city pages, 4 Atlas entries, 3 lane pages and 8 trade and history pages for Malaysia, 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 travel and connections 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.