The OnBoard Courier for Philippines

After it come Cebu (CEB) with 36 destinations and about 118.5 departures a day and Davao City (DVO) with 13 destinations and about 38.6 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 the Philippines that publish departures schedule about 584 movements a day and reach 129 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 MNL alone, 1,223 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 80 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.

67 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 31 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 20.1 flights a day, Hong Kong, about 19.4 flights a day, Singapore, about 18.4 flights a day, Taiwan, about 18.1 flights a day and South Korea, about 18.1 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from the Philippines without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from the Philippines to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

53 airlines fly out of the Philippines in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Philippine Airlines on 74 routes, Cebu Pacific Air on 70 routes, PAL Express and Airphil Express on 19 routes, Cebgo on 17 routes and Philippines AirAsia 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 MNL in this data runs to New York, United States (JFK), 13,696 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.

Counting what is already published, this site holds 7 city pages, 4 standalone city pages, 3 Atlas entries, 1 airport page, 1 lane page and 8 trade and history pages for the Philippines, 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.