CNS Cairns

How deep the CNS board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from CNS. This reads the same 28 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.

• 21of the 28 destinations are flown by one airline
• 14destinations run less than once a day
• 4destinations have four or more departures a day
• 39.3%of the destinations name Jetstar, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at CNS

Twelve airlines appear on the CNS board and they do not hold it evenly. Jetstar is on 11 of the 28 destinations, 39.3 per cent of them, and on 8 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 37.9 of the 60.6 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 Qantas on 9 destinations. 5 of the 12 airlines at CNS 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 CNS: one airline on 39.3 per cent of the destinations and the other 60.7 per cent spread across 11 airlines. A cancellation inside the Jetstar network is often survivable inside the same booking, but on the 17 destinations Jetstar does not touch, a rebooking means moving to a carrier the desk has to check for a through fare first.

How much of the CNS board is daily

Of the 28 destinations, 14 are flown at least once a day and 14 are not, 2 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the CNS 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: CNS to Kowanyama (KWM) 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 39.9 of the 60.6 departures a day, 65.8 per cent of the whole board. More than half of everything that leaves CNS is aimed at those five places, so the depth on the board above is thinner than the destination count suggests, and a hand carry that is not going to one of them is planned around a single departure time.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Cloncurry CNJ	Australia	Alliance Airlines	1	695	plan this
Kowanyama KWM	Australia	Skytrans	1	455	plan this
Christchurch CHC	New Zealand	Jetstar	2	3,886	plan this
Nadi NAN	Fiji	Fiji Airways	3	3,361	plan this
Perth PER	Australia	Jetstar	3	3,432	the pair page
Auckland AKL	New Zealand	Air New Zealand	4	3,619	the pair page
Maroochydore MCY	Australia	Jetstar	4	1,319	plan this
Denpasar-Bali Island DPS	Indonesia	Jetstar	5	3,433	the pair page
Mt Isa ISA	Australia	Rex Regional Express	5	782	plan this
Proserpine PPP	Australia	Skytrans	5	498	plan this

The ten destinations out of CNS 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. 3 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from CNS

The desk holds the return direction for 14 of the 28 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On none of those 14 does the return run more than a quarter thinner than the outbound, so a turnaround through CNS is a question of hours rather than of whether an aircraft exists.

The clock at CNS

CNS keeps Australia/Brisbane time, six hours ahead of Dubai all year.

When it is 09:00 on a Dubai working morning it is 15:00 at CNS, so a nine to six day at each end overlaps for three hours. That is a narrow window for a signature, a customs query or an authority to release, and it is the reason a consignment for CNS is briefed the day before rather than on the morning it flies.

The night at CNS

3 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 Sydney (SYD) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from CNS that lands inside it leaves around 19:59, on a modelled block of 3h 01m. Into Adelaide (ADL) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from CNS that lands inside it leaves around 20:17, on a modelled block of 3h 13m. Into Tokyo (NRT) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from CNS that lands inside it leaves around 16:25, on a modelled block of 7h 35m. Those three departure times out of CNS 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 CNS turns up on the rest of this site

The airport also sits behind the Australia country desk, which sets out the customs practice, the working week and the road legs behind this airport.

The site publishes 7 airport pair pages that start or end at CNS, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Cairns to Brisbane City (BNE), Cairns to Sydney (SYD) and Cairns to Melbourne (MEL).

One courier posting names CNS as the airport a courier here flies from: Cairns.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with CNS already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 28 destinations above.