NQZ Astana

How deep the NQZ board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from NQZ. This reads the same 59 destinations back for the questions a dispatcher asks second: how much of the board rests on one airline, how much of it runs less than daily, whether the return leg is as thick as the outbound, what the clock here does to a Gulf working day and which of the destinations shut at night, all of it computed on 2026-09-07 from AeroDataBox scheduled route statistics.

• 38of the 59 destinations are flown by one airline
• 29destinations run less than once a day
• 8destinations have four or more departures a day
• 40.7%of the destinations name Air Astana, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at NQZ

25 airlines appear on the NQZ board and they do not hold it evenly. Air Astana is on 24 of the 59 destinations, 40.7 per cent of them, and on 6 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 88.3 of the 115 departures a day this airport files, though other airlines fly some of the same sectors, so read that as reach rather than as a share of the aircraft.

The next largest presence is SCAT Airlines on 20 destinations. 15 of the 25 airlines at NQZ appear on a single destination each, which is the long tail every airport carries, and none of it is a rebooking option when the sector you need is the one that fell over.

That is a middling concentration at NQZ: one airline on 40.7 per cent of the destinations and the other 59.3 per cent spread across 24 airlines. A cancellation inside the Air Astana network is often survivable inside the same booking, but on the 35 destinations Air Astana does not touch, a rebooking means moving to a carrier the desk has to check for a through fare first.

How much of the NQZ board is daily

Of the 59 destinations, 30 are flown at least once a day and 29 are not, 4 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the NQZ board is flown about once a day.

An average of 0.14 flights a day is the schedule statistic, and it is worth translating it before anything is promised to anybody: NQZ to Yerevan (EVN) is about one a week, so a missed departure there is not a delay of hours, it is the next slot.

The five busiest destinations carry 53.6 of the 115 departures a day, 46.6 per cent of the whole board. The other 54 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at NQZ usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Balkhash BXH	Kazakhstan	Qazaq Air	1	527	plan this
Chennai MAA	India	SCAT Airlines	1	4,301	the pair page
Omsk OMS	Russia	Qazaq Air	1	456	plan this
Yerevan EVN	Armenia	Shirak Avia	1	2,409	plan this
Arqalyk AYK	Kazakhstan	SCAT Airlines	2	328	plan this
Belgrade BEG	Serbia	SCAT Airlines	2	3,795	plan this
Dushanbe DYU	Tajikistan	Somon Air	2	1,403	plan this
Gazipaşa GZP	Turkiye	Fly Arystan	2	3,495	plan this
Larnarca LCA	Cyprus	Air Astana	2	3,510	plan this
Malé MLE	Maldives	Air Astana	2	5,211	plan this

The ten destinations out of NQZ where one airline holds the sector and files fewer than seven departures a week, with the weekly figure taken as the average daily rate multiplied by seven rather than as a fixed timetable. 17 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from NQZ

The desk holds the return direction for 32 of the 59 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On four of them the return into NQZ runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Da Nang (DAD) at 0.86 out a day against 0.29 back, Sanya (SYX) at 0.71 out a day against 0.29 back and Malé (MLE) at 0.29 out a day against 0.14 back.

A return leg thinner than the outbound is the ordinary reason a same day round trip out of NQZ turns into an overnight, and it is worth checking on each of those 4 sectors before the courier is committed rather than after.

The clock at NQZ

NQZ keeps Asia/Almaty time, an hour ahead of Dubai all year.

When it is 09:00 on a Dubai working morning it is 10:00 at NQZ, so a nine to six day at each end overlaps for eight hours. That is wide enough to settle a customs question at NQZ and still make a departure the same day.

The night at NQZ

1 of the destinations from here carry a documented night restriction of their own, which is a departure time question at this end rather than an arrival problem at the other.

Into Frankfurt-am-Main (FRA) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from NQZ that lands inside it leaves around 20:18, on a modelled block of 5h 42m. Those one departure times out of NQZ are worked backwards from the published window with the block time model this site uses everywhere, 720 to 880 km an hour by sector length with thirty minutes on the ground, so they are arithmetic rather than a timetable and the desk checks the published departure before it promises the landing.

Where NQZ turns up on the rest of this site

NQZ carries two other pages on this site as well: the Kazakhstan country desk, which sets out the customs practice, the working week and the road legs behind this airport and the NQZ transit page for the connecting case, where a courier changes aircraft here rather than starting or finishing.

The site publishes 6 airport pair pages that start or end at NQZ, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Astana to Almaty (ALA), Astana to Moscow (SVO) and Astana to Baku (GYD).

One courier posting names NQZ as the airport a courier here flies from: Astana.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with NQZ already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 59 destinations above.