> Employing 103 couriers at 12 hubs around the world, the DCS boasts a delivery success rate that would be the envy of FedEx and UPS.<p>Do they? The article never backs that up:<p>> Nobody at the service could remember a single lost pouch or unsuccessful delivery in the service’s modern history, though missions can be aborted for political, weather, or mechanical reasons if necessary. The service did once manage to lose a baby grand piano along the Orient Express in 1919. Evidently, the courier—David K E Bruce, later a renowned diplomat—slept beneath it on a railway platform in Bulgaria and woke to find the piano was gone.<p>I'd count cancelled missions as unsuccessful, just as I'd count a cancelled delivery by UPS.<p>Given that the Diplomatic Couriers Service <i>must</i> have orders of magnitude fewer packages than e.g. UPS or FedEx, it's entirely possible that those few failures are a higher failure rate than the commercial carriers.<p>None of that's to detract from the DCS's really cool achievements — I just dislike journalistic hyperbole.