The OnBoard Courier for Mauritius

The scheduled network file behind this site holds departure data for one airport in Mauritius. The largest is Port Louis Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam (MRU), the airport at Port Louis, with 22 scheduled destinations in 17 countries flown by 18 airlines and about 27 departures a day. That single airport carries 100 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country, which is the first thing a desk needs to know: there is no realistic second gateway, so a cancellation there is a lost day.

Reach matters more than frequency for a hand carry, because a courier flies whatever is leaving. From MRU alone, 847 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 22 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.

7 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 1 domestic destination. 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 Réunion, about 4.7 flights a day, South Africa, about 3.9 flights a day, the United Arab Emirates, about 3.1 flights a day, India, about 2.2 flights a day and France, about 2.1 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Mauritius without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Mauritius to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

18 airlines fly out of Mauritius in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Air Mauritius on 12 routes, Corsair on 2 routes, South African Airways on 2 routes, Turkish Airlines on 2 routes and Air Austral on 1 route. 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 MRU in this data runs to London, United Kingdom (LGW), 9,748 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 2 standalone city pages and 1 Atlas entry for Mauritius, 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 coverage here is thin, and saying so is more useful than padding it. What exists is accurate; what is missing is missing because nothing on this desk has been written about it yet.