The OnBoard Courier for Puerto Rico

The scheduled network file behind this site holds departure data for one airport in Puerto Rico. The largest is San Juan Luis Munoz Marin (SJU), the airport at San Juan, with 59 scheduled destinations in 17 countries flown by 25 airlines and about 177.8 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 SJU alone, 950 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 59 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.

8 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 3 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 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 the United States, about 108.8 flights a day, the US Virgin Islands, about 14.3 flights a day, the Dominican Republic, about 12.1 flights a day, the British Virgin Islands, about 7.3 flights a day and BL, about 5.6 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Puerto Rico without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Puerto Rico to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

25 airlines fly out of Puerto Rico in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to JetBlue Airways on 21 routes, Frontier Airlines on 12 routes, Cape Air on 6 routes, American Airlines on 5 routes and United Airlines on 5 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 SJU in this data runs to Madrid, Spain (MAD), 6,379 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.

Nothing in the network file leaves an Emirates airport for Puerto Rico without a change. The best connection it holds runs Dubai to New York and then New York to San Juan (SJU), and the weaker of the two legs, the one that decides whether the connection actually holds, runs about 2.4 times a day. The alternatives are Aguadilla via New York, about 1.1 a day on the weaker leg, Ponce via Orlando, about 0.7 a day on the weaker leg and San Juan via Boston, about 0.3 a day on the weaker leg.

A connection is not a defect on this kind of work, it is the normal case, and it changes only one thing: the courier stays with the consignment through the transfer rather than handing it to anyone. Baggage is not checked through, the item does not enter a transit shed, and the chain of custody survives the change of aircraft because the same person carries it onto the second one.