CAI Cairo

How deep the CAI board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from CAI. This reads the same 105 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.

• 59of the 105 destinations are flown by one airline
• 48destinations run less than once a day
• 21destinations have four or more departures a day
• 78.1%of the destinations name EgyptAir, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at CAI

54 airlines appear on the CAI board and they do not hold it evenly. EgyptAir is on 82 of the 105 destinations, 78.1 per cent of them, and on 40 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 293.1 of the 311.7 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 Air Cairo on 18 destinations. 38 of the 54 airlines at CAI 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.

An airport held this tightly is quick to book and slow to recover: with 82 of the 105 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on a CAI sector is usually another EgyptAir aircraft, and when there is not one the desk is looking at another airport rather than another airline. That is why the alternate airports listed above matter more at CAI than the destination count does.

How much of the CAI board is daily

Of the 105 destinations, 57 are flown at least once a day and 48 are not, 4 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the CAI 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: CAI 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 115.7 of the 311.7 departures a day, 37.1 per cent of the whole board. The other 100 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at CAI usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
El Alamein DBB	Egypt	EgyptAir	1	296	plan this
Juba JUB	South Sudan	EgyptAir	1	2,808	plan this
Valencia VLC	Spain	Nesma Airlines	1	3,073	the pair page
Yerevan EVN	Armenia	Air Cairo	1	1,621	plan this
Al Ain City AAN	the United Arab Emirates	Nile Air	2	2,475	plan this
Antalya AYT	Turkiye	Sun Express	2	756	plan this
Chengdu TFU	China	Sichuan Airlines	2	6,882	plan this
Jakarta CGK	Indonesia	EgyptAir	2	8,949	the pair page
Kinshasa FIH	the Democratic Republic of the Congo	EgyptAir	2	4,196	plan this
Lyon LYS	France	Transavia France	2	2,865	the pair page

The ten destinations out of CAI 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. 37 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from CAI

The desk holds the return direction for 97 of the 105 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On two of them the return into CAI runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Zanzibar (ZNZ) at 0.29 out a day against 0.14 back and Madrid (MAD) at 2.1 out a day against 1.6 back.

It runs the other way as well: Istanbul (IST) files 8.7 a day back into CAI against 3.9 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at CAI

CAI keeps Africa/Cairo time, an hour behind Dubai in summer and two hours behind in winter, because the clock here moves and the Gulf clock does not.

When it is 09:00 on a Dubai working morning it is 08:00 at CAI, so a nine to six day at each end overlaps for eight hours. That is wide enough to settle a customs question at CAI and still make a departure the same day.

The night at CAI

14 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 London (LHR) the door shuts at 23:30 local, so the last departure from CAI that lands inside it leaves around 20:45, on a modelled block of 4h 45m. Into Frankfurt-am-Main (FRA) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from CAI that lands inside it leaves around 19:46, on a modelled block of 4h 14m. Into Paris (CDG) the door shuts at 00:00 local, so the last departure from CAI that lands inside it leaves around 20:38, on a modelled block of 4h 22m. Those three departure times out of CAI 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 CAI turns up on the rest of this site

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

The site publishes 51 airport pair pages that start or end at CAI, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Cairo to Jeddah (JED), Cairo to Riyadh (RUH) and Cairo to Medina (MED).

Three of the 346 published hand carry lanes run through this airport: Cairo to Athens, Cairo to Sharjah and Sharjah to Cairo. A lane page is the commercial version of the board above, with the customs, the ground legs and the price at CAI written out.

Four courier postings name CAI as the airport a courier here flies from: Cairo, Port Said and Suez.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with CAI already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 105 destinations above.