FAO Faro

How deep the FAO board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from FAO. This reads the same 87 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.

• 53of the 87 destinations are flown by one airline
• 42destinations run less than once a day
• 7destinations have four or more departures a day
• 52.9%of the destinations name Ryanair, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at FAO

39 airlines appear on the FAO board and they do not hold it evenly. Ryanair is on 46 of the 87 destinations, 52.9 per cent of them, and on 25 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 82.5 of the 132.3 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 easyJet on 17 destinations. 21 of the 39 airlines at FAO 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 46 of the 87 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on an FAO sector is usually another Ryanair 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 FAO than the destination count does.

How much of the FAO board is daily

Of the 87 destinations, 45 are flown at least once a day and 42 are not, 6 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the FAO 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: FAO to St Helier (JER) 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 32.6 of the 132.3 departures a day, 24.6 per cent of the whole board. The other 82 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at FAO usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Gdańsk GDN	Poland	Enter Air	1	2,787	plan this
Paris CDG	France	Air France	1	1,581	plan this
Prague PRG	Czechia	Eurowings	1	2,292	plan this
Reykjavik KEF	Iceland	Icelandair	1	3,155	plan this
Riga RIX	Latvia	airBaltic	1	3,229	plan this
St Helier JER	Jersey	British Airways	1	1,433	plan this
Durham MME	the United Kingdom	Ryanair	2	2,008	plan this
Exeter EXT	the United Kingdom	Ryanair	2	1,568	plan this
Helsinki HEL	Finland	Finnair	2	3,475	plan this
Killarney KIR	Ireland	Ryanair	2	1,691	plan this

The ten destinations out of FAO 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. 28 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from FAO

The desk holds the return direction for 66 of the 87 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On one of them the return into FAO runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gap is London (LCY) at 1 out a day against 0.71 back.

It runs the other way as well: London (LGW) files 13.6 a day back into FAO against 9.1 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at FAO

FAO keeps Europe/Lisbon time, three hours behind Dubai in summer and four 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 06:00 at FAO, so a nine to six day at each end overlaps for six hours. A customs question raised in the last three hours of the Dubai afternoon reaches nobody at FAO until the next morning, which is the practical limit on a same day instruction here.

The night at FAO

16 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 (LGW) the door shuts at 23:30 local, so the last departure from FAO that lands inside it leaves around 20:51, on a modelled block of 2h 39m. Into Paris (ORY) the door shuts at 23:30 local, so the last departure from FAO that lands inside it leaves around 20:01, on a modelled block of 2h 29m. Into Amsterdam (AMS) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from FAO that lands inside it leaves around 18:59, on a modelled block of 3h 01m. Those three departure times out of FAO 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 FAO turns up on the rest of this site

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

The site publishes 21 airport pair pages that start or end at FAO, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Faro to London (LGW), Faro to Bristol (BRS) and Faro to Paris (ORY).

Three courier postings name FAO as the airport a courier here flies from: Huelva, Faro and Portimão.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with FAO already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 87 destinations above.