The OnBoard Courier for Vietnam

After it come Hanoi (HAN) with 87 destinations and about 368.8 departures a day and Da Nang (DAD) with 29 destinations and about 161.7 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 3 airports in Vietnam that publish departures schedule about 910.7 movements a day and reach 193 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 SGN alone, 1,230 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 77 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.

60 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 18 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 China, about 64.1 flights a day, South Korea, about 47 flights a day, Thailand, about 40.7 flights a day, Taiwan, about 32.6 flights a day and Malaysia, about 27.4 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Vietnam without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Vietnam to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

74 airlines fly out of Vietnam in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Vietnam Airlines on 106 routes, VietJetAir on 86 routes, 9G Rail on 16 routes, VECA on 13 routes and China Eastern Airlines on 8 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 SGN in this data runs to San Francisco, United States (SFO), 12,599 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.

Counting what is already published, this site holds 8 city pages, 6 standalone city pages, 3 Atlas entries, 2 airport pages, 2 lane pages and 8 trade and history pages for Vietnam, 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 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.