CAN Guangzhou

How deep the CAN board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from CAN. This reads the same 198 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.

• 106of the 198 destinations are flown by one airline
• 63destinations run less than once a day
• 51destinations have four or more departures a day
• 74.2%of the destinations name China Southern Airlines, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at CAN

78 airlines appear on the CAN board and they do not hold it evenly. China Southern Airlines is on 147 of the 198 destinations, 74.2 per cent of them, and on 62 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 732.1 of the 823.8 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 9 Air Co on 36 destinations. 48 of the 78 airlines at CAN 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 147 of the 198 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on a CAN sector is usually another China Southern Airlines 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 CAN than the destination count does.

How much of the CAN board is daily

Of the 198 destinations, 135 are flown at least once a day and 63 are not, 5 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the CAN 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: CAN to Port Darwin (DRW) 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 155.9 of the 823.8 departures a day, 18.9 per cent of the whole board. The other 193 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at CAN usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Busan-si PUS	South Korea	Air Busan	1	2,000	plan this
Dar es Salaam DAR	Tanzania	Air Tanzania	1	8,711	plan this
Luanda NBJ	Angola	TAAG	1	11,399	plan this
New York JFK	the United States	China Southern Airlines	1	12,858	the pair page
Port Darwin DRW	Australia	China Southern Airlines	1	4,417	plan this
Altay AAT	China	China Southern Airlines	2	3,508	plan this
Baghdad BGW	Iraq	I A W	2	6,731	plan this
Kuching KCH	Malaysia	Malindo Air	2	2,457	plan this
Meixian MXZ	China	China Southern Airlines	2	307	plan this
Perth PER	Australia	China Southern Airlines	2	6,159	the pair page

The ten destinations out of CAN 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. 49 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from CAN

The desk holds the return direction for 91 of the 198 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On eleven of them the return into CAN runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Tehran (IKA) at 2.1 out a day against 0.29 back, Kuching (KCH) at 0.29 out a day against 0.14 back and Melbourne (MEL) at 3 out a day against 1.7 back.

It runs the other way as well: Chengdu (CTU) files 23.4 a day back into CAN against 11.6 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at CAN

CAN 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 CAN, 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 CAN until the next morning, which is the practical limit on a same day instruction here.

The night at CAN

7 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 CAN that lands inside it leaves around 11:26, on a modelled block of 9h 34m. Into London (LHR) the door shuts at 23:30 local, so the last departure from CAN that lands inside it leaves around 18:34, on a modelled block of 11h 56m. Into Frankfurt-am-Main (FRA) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from CAN that lands inside it leaves around 17:38, on a modelled block of 11h 22m. Those three departure times out of CAN 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 CAN turns up on the rest of this site

CAN 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 CAN transit page for the connecting case, where a courier changes aircraft here rather than starting or finishing.

The site publishes 53 airport pair pages that start or end at CAN, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Guangzhou to Shanghai (SHA), Guangzhou to Hangzhou (HGH) and Guangzhou to Beijing (PKX).

One of the 346 published hand carry lanes runs through this airport: Dubai to Guangzhou. A lane page is the commercial version of the board above, with the customs, the ground legs and the price at CAN written out.

Four courier postings name CAN as the airport a courier here flies from: Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Dongguan.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with CAN already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 198 destinations above.