The OnBoard Courier for Portugal

After it come Porto (OPO) with 138 destinations and about 208.4 departures a day, Faro (FAO) with 87 destinations and about 132.3 departures a day and Funchal (FNC) with 67 destinations and about 63.9 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 Portugal that publish departures schedule about 772.6 movements a day and reach 446 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 LIS alone, 1,520 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 154 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.

15 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 10 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 the United Kingdom, about 106.6 flights a day, Spain, about 102.9 flights a day, France, about 91.3 flights a day, Germany, about 65.3 flights a day and Italy, about 37.6 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Portugal without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Portugal to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

90 airlines fly out of Portugal in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Ryanair on 159 routes, TAP Air Portugal on 105 routes, easyJet on 87 routes, Jet2 on 27 routes and Eurowings on 20 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 LIS in this data runs to Hangzhou, China (HGH), 10,734 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 4 standalone city pages, 4 Atlas entries, 1 airport page and 2 lane pages for Portugal, 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.