The OnBoard Courier for United States

After it come Denver (DEN) with 245 destinations and about 1,131.7 departures a day, Atlanta (ATL) with 253 destinations and about 1,118.1 departures a day, Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) with 287 destinations and about 1,102.3 departures a day, Los Angeles (LAX) with 212 destinations and about 826.3 departures a day and New York (JFK) with 227 destinations and about 730.2 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 57 airports in the United States that publish departures schedule about 22,210.8 movements a day and reach 7,960 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 ORD alone, 1,795 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 295 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.

87 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 747 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 Canada, about 559.4 flights a day, Mexico, about 360 flights a day, the United Kingdom, about 165.2 flights a day, Puerto Rico, about 110 flights a day and the Dominican Republic, about 96.4 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from the United States without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from the United States to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

192 airlines fly out of the United States in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to American Airlines on 1,504 routes, Delta Air Lines on 1,313 routes, United Airlines on 1,286 routes, Southwest Airlines on 1,230 routes and NetJets Aviation on 1,229 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 ORD in this data runs to Hong Kong, Hong Kong (HKG), 12,522 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, the United States is reached nonstop. The network file records 13 such pairs: Dubai to New York (JFK), about 2.4 a day on Emirates, Abu Dhabi to Chicago (ORD), about 2.3 a day on Etihad Airways, Abu Dhabi to Atlanta (ATL), about 1.1 a day on Etihad Airways, Dubai to Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW), about 1.1 a day on Emirates and Dubai to Los Angeles (LAX), about 1.1 a day on 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 and Etihad Airways. 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 8 such sites in the United States, across aerospace, automotive and pharma: Airbus at Mobile, Alabama, Boeing at Everett and Renton, BMW at Spartanburg, South Carolina, Mercedes-Benz at Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Ford at Dearborn and Cologne and Eli Lilly at Indianapolis. 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 Mobile, Alabama: A220 and A320 family final assembly for the North American market. A European supply chain feeding an American line across an ocean. That is the shape of the work in the United States, and it is why the airports above matter more than the distance does.

This site publishes 53 lane pages that cross the border of the United States. Leaving the United States: Boston to Zurich, Chicago to Frankfurt, Chicago to Queretaro, Detroit to Frankfurt, Detroit to Monterrey, Detroit to Silao, Detroit to Stuttgart and El Paso to Ciudad Juarez. Arriving: Abu Dhabi to Chicago, Abu Dhabi to New York, Amsterdam to Detroit, Copenhagen to Boston, Doha to Chicago, Doha to Houston, Doha to New York and Dubai to Atlanta.

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 the United States is connected to on this desk are Abu Dhabi, Amsterdam, Zurich, Frankfurt, Queretaro, Copenhagen, Monterrey, Silao, Stuttgart and Doha, plus 18 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 35 city pages, 42 standalone city pages, 53 Atlas entries, 4 airport pages, 53 lane pages and 49 trade and history pages for the United States, 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. This is one of the most heavily covered markets on the site, and the depth is the point: a shipper in a particular city with a particular part does not want a country page, they want their own.