The OnBoard Courier for Spain

After it come Barcelona (BCN) with 233 destinations and about 625.2 departures a day, Palma De Mallorca (PMI) with 189 destinations and about 536.4 departures a day, Málaga (AGP) with 163 destinations and about 321.8 departures a day, Alicante (ALC) with 145 destinations and about 231.5 departures a day and Gran Canaria Island (LPA) with 119 destinations and about 213 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 12 airports in Spain that publish departures schedule about 3,427.8 movements a day and reach 1,568 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 MAD alone, 1,787 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 252 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.

32 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 45 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 448.3 flights a day, Germany, about 324.3 flights a day, Italy, about 250.7 flights a day, France, about 186 flights a day and the Netherlands, about 103.7 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Spain without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Spain to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

155 airlines fly out of Spain in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Ryanair on 569 routes, Vueling on 225 routes, Iberia on 195 routes, easyJet on 165 routes and Air Europa on 89 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 MAD in this data runs to Tokyo, Japan (NRT), 10,770 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.

From the Emirates, Spain is reached nonstop. The network file records 5 such pairs: Dubai to Barcelona (BCN), about 3.4 a day on Emirates, Abu Dhabi to Madrid (MAD), about 2.7 a day on Etihad Airways, Abu Dhabi to Palma De Mallorca (PMI), about 0.6 a day on Etihad Airways, Abu Dhabi to Málaga (AGP), about 0.6 a day on Etihad Airways and Jebel Ali to Zaragoza (ZAZ), about 0.3 a day on Atlas Air and Emirates. More than one nonstop pair means more than one chance to travel on the day the consignment is ready, which is worth more on this kind of work than any single fast flight.

The carriers on those sectors are Emirates, Etihad Airways and Atlas Air. With this few, the desk knows all of their cabin rules by heart, which is the difference between quoting in fifteen minutes and quoting after a phone call.

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 3 such sites in Spain, across aerospace and automotive: Airbus at Getafe and Illescas, Airbus at Sevilla San Pablo and SEAT at Martorell. 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. Airbus at Getafe and Illescas: Rear fuselage, tail sections and composite structures. The Spanish sites sit on the same takt as the French and German ones. That is the shape of the work in Spain, and it is why the airports above matter more than the distance does.

This site publishes 11 lane pages that cross the border of Spain. Leaving Spain: Madrid to Bogota, Madrid to Buenos Aires, Madrid to Guadalajara, Madrid to Mexico City, Madrid to Monterrey and Madrid to Sao Paulo. Arriving: Abu Dhabi to Madrid, Doha to Madrid, Dubai to Barcelona, Dubai to Madrid and Frankfurt to Madrid.

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 Spain is connected to on this desk are Abu Dhabi, Doha, Dubai, Frankfurt, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey and Sao Paulo. 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 13 city pages, 6 standalone city pages, 12 Atlas entries, 2 airport pages and 11 lane pages for Spain, 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, 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.