The OnBoard Courier for South Korea

After it come Jeju City (CJU) with 34 destinations and about 294.6 departures a day, Seoul-si (GMP) with 19 destinations and about 205.7 departures a day and Busan-si (PUS) with 48 destinations and about 175 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 South Korea that publish departures schedule about 1,316.5 movements a day and reach 266 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 ICN alone, 1,915 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.

37 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 14 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 Japan, about 253.5 flights a day, China, about 212.1 flights a day, Vietnam, about 73.9 flights a day, Taiwan, about 54.6 flights a day and the United States, about 47 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from South Korea without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from South Korea to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

94 airlines fly out of South Korea in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Korean Air on 107 routes, Asiana Airlines on 68 routes, Jeju Air on 61 routes, Jin Air on 58 routes and T'Way Air on 41 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 ICN in this data runs to Mexico City, Mexico (MEX), 12,096 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.

Hand carry demand is not spread evenly across a country, it sits where something expensive stops when a part is missing. The industrial geography file behind this site records 2 such sites in South Korea, across automotive and semiconductor: Hyundai and Kia at Ulsan and Hwaseong and Samsung at Hwaseong and Giheung. These are public manufacturing and research sites, named as the reason a lane exists. Nothing here says any of them is a customer of any courier operator.

Take the first of them. Hyundai and Kia at Ulsan and Hwaseong: The largest car plant complex in the world by capacity at Ulsan. Korean lines with European and American tooling. That is the shape of the work in South Korea, and it is why the airports above matter more than the distance does.

This site publishes 14 lane pages that cross the border of South Korea. Leaving South Korea: Seoul to Abu Dhabi, Seoul to Frankfurt, Seoul to Monterrey, Seoul to San Francisco, Seoul to Shanghai and Seoul to Tokyo. Arriving: Abu Dhabi to Seoul, Amsterdam to Seoul, Doha to Seoul, Dubai to Seoul, Frankfurt to Seoul, Helsinki to Seoul, Munich to Seoul and Warsaw to Seoul.

Each of those has its own page with the flying time, the gateway pair and what actually moves on it. Read together they say something the individual pages do not: the places South Korea is connected to on this desk are Abu Dhabi, Amsterdam, Doha, Dubai, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Munich, Monterrey, San Francisco and Shanghai, plus 2 more. A lane page exists because the traffic on it is real, not because the pair looked plausible on a map.

Counting what is already published, this site holds 8 city pages, 2 standalone city pages, 4 Atlas entries, 2 airport pages, 14 lane pages and 8 trade and history pages for South Korea, 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.