The OnBoard Courier for Switzerland

After it come Geneva (GVA) with 159 destinations and about 227.4 departures a day. That is the only alternate, so the rebooking options are thin. Between them the 2 airports in Switzerland that publish departures schedule about 684.5 movements a day and reach 382 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 ZRH alone, 1,671 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 223 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.

3 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 4 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 Spain, about 82.5 flights a day, Germany, about 70.5 flights a day, Italy, about 58.7 flights a day, the United Kingdom, about 57.4 flights a day and France, about 47.9 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Switzerland without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Switzerland to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

75 airlines fly out of Switzerland in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to SWISS on 108 routes, easyJet on 92 routes, Edelweiss Air on 74 routes, Comlux Aruba on 15 routes and Super Air Jet on 14 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 ZRH in this data runs to Tanjung Pandan-Belitung Island, Indonesia (TJQ), 10,925 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.

Switzerland runs 2h behind Dubai. That is why the departure chosen matters more than the flight time: the same sector can land inside the consignee's working day or an hour after it closed, depending on which bank the courier makes. An offset this small is forgiving: almost any morning departure still arrives inside the working day at the other end, and the desk plans around the airport rather than around the clock.

Night restrictions are recorded for ZRH and GVA: ZRH between 23:00 and 06:00 local and GVA between 00:00 and 06:00 local. A late evening departure that slips past the start of one of those windows does not go until the morning, which on an urgent consignment is not a delay of an hour but of a working day. Those hours apply to scheduled movements, exemptions and seasonal variations exist, and the desk checks them against the airport and the carrier before it books rather than relying on the list.

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 Switzerland, across pharma: Novartis at Basel, Roche at Basel and Kaiseraugst and Lonza at Visp and Basel. 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. Novartis at Basel: Research and manufacturing at the group head office. Basel sits where three countries meet and uses three airports. That is the shape of the work in Switzerland, and it is why the airports above matter more than the distance does.

This site publishes 11 lane pages that cross the border of Switzerland. Leaving Switzerland: Zurich to Abu Dhabi, Zurich to Boston, Zurich to Frankfurt, Zurich to Hong Kong, Zurich to Monterrey and Zurich to Shanghai. Arriving: Abu Dhabi to Zurich, Boston to Zurich, Doha to Zurich, Dubai to Geneva and Dubai to Zurich.

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 Switzerland is connected to on this desk are Abu Dhabi, Boston, Doha, Dubai, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Monterrey and Shanghai. 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 12 city pages, 4 standalone city pages, 2 Atlas entries, 1 airport page, 11 lane pages and 7 trade and history pages for Switzerland, 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.