The OnBoard Courier for Poland

After it come Kraków (KRK) with 135 destinations and about 161.2 departures a day, Gdańsk (GDN) with 93 destinations and about 94.7 departures a day, Wrocław (WRO) with 70 destinations and about 77.1 departures a day and Poznań (POZ) with 50 destinations and about 40.2 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 5 airports in Poland that publish departures schedule about 700.8 movements a day and reach 513 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 WAW alone, 1,354 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 165 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.

10 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 12 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 Italy, about 60.9 flights a day, Germany, about 55 flights a day, the United Kingdom, about 54.3 flights a day, Spain, about 52.7 flights a day and Greece, about 33.4 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Poland without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Poland to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

58 airlines fly out of Poland in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Ryanair on 211 routes, Wizz Air on 137 routes, LOT - Polish Airlines on 125 routes, Enter Air on 47 routes and Smartwings Poland on 40 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 WAW in this data runs to Los Angeles, United States (LAX), 9,658 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 9 city pages, 2 standalone city pages, 5 Atlas entries, 4 airport pages and 4 lane pages for Poland, 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 entry and formalities guide 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.