CTU Chengdu

How deep the CTU board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from CTU. This reads the same 67 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 and what the clock here does to a Gulf working day, all of it computed on 2026-09-07 from AeroDataBox scheduled route statistics.

• 20of the 67 destinations are flown by one airline
• 12destinations run less than once a day
• 30destinations have four or more departures a day
• 62.7%of the destinations name Air China, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at CTU

16 airlines appear on the CTU board and they do not hold it evenly. Air China is on 42 of the 67 destinations, 62.7 per cent of them, and on 5 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 295.4 of the 357.2 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 Sichuan Airlines on 40 destinations. 6 of the 16 airlines at CTU 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 42 of the 67 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on a CTU sector is usually another Air China 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 CTU than the destination count does.

How much of the CTU board is daily

Of the 67 destinations, 55 are flown at least once a day and 12 are not, though none of them drops to once a week or less. The median destination on the CTU board is flown 3.3 times a day.

An average of 0.29 flights a day is the schedule statistic, and it is worth translating it before anything is promised to anybody: CTU to Dunhuang (DNH) is 2 a week, so a missed departure there is not a delay of hours, it is the next slot.

The five busiest destinations carry 122 of the 357.2 departures a day, 34.1 per cent of the whole board. The other 62 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at CTU usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Dunhuang DNH	China	Chengdu Airlines	2	1,348	plan this
Aksu AKU	China	Chengdu Airlines	3	2,427	plan this
Sanming SQJ	China	Tibet Airlines	3	1,432	plan this
Shantou SWA	China	Chengdu Airlines	3	1,467	plan this
Yuncheng YCU	China	Tibet Airlines	3	832	plan this
Bazhong BZX	China	Air China	5	287	plan this
Changzhou CZX	China	Sichuan Airlines	5	1,511	plan this
Dazhou DZH	China	Chengdu Airlines	5	335	plan this
Huangyan HYN	China	Chengdu Airlines	5	1,704	plan this
Linyi LYI	China	Tibet Airlines	5	1,439	plan this

The ten destinations out of CTU 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. 2 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from CTU

The desk holds the return direction for 21 of the 67 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On six of them the return into CTU runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Harbin (HRB) at 2.9 out a day against 0.71 back, Guangzhou (CAN) at 23.4 out a day against 11.6 back and Haikou (HAK) at 5.9 out a day against 3.4 back.

It runs the other way as well: Shanghai (SHA) files 16.1 a day back into CTU against 6.1 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at CTU

CTU keeps Asia/Shanghai time, four hours ahead of Dubai all year.

When it is 09:00 on a Dubai working morning it is 13:00 at CTU, so a nine to six day at each end overlaps for five hours. A customs question raised in the last four hours of the Dubai afternoon reaches nobody at CTU until the next morning, which is the practical limit on a same day instruction here.

Where CTU turns up on the rest of this site

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

The site publishes 20 airport pair pages that start or end at CTU, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Chengdu to Beijing (PEK), Chengdu to Shenzhen (SZX) and Chengdu to Guangzhou (CAN).

One courier posting names CTU as the airport a courier here flies from: Chengdu.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with CTU already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 67 destinations above.