IST Istanbul

How deep the IST board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from IST. This reads the same 294 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.

• 212of the 294 destinations are flown by one airline
• 85destinations run less than once a day
• 47destinations have four or more departures a day
• 83%of the destinations name Turkish Airlines, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at IST

110 airlines appear on the IST board and they do not hold it evenly. Turkish Airlines is on 244 of the 294 destinations, 83 per cent of them, and on 171 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 663.1 of the 719.9 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 Aeroflot on 7 destinations. 68 of the 110 airlines at IST 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 244 of the 294 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on an IST sector is usually another Turkish 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 IST than the destination count does.

How much of the IST board is daily

Of the 294 destinations, 209 are flown at least once a day and 85 are not, 13 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the IST 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: IST to Ufa (UFA) 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 87.1 of the 719.9 departures a day, 12.1 per cent of the whole board. The other 289 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at IST usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Amman ADJ	Jordan	Fly Jordan	1	1,218	plan this
Andizhan AZN	Uzbekistan	Uzbekistan Airways	1	3,615	plan this
Chelyabinsk CEK	Russia	Aeroflot	1	2,842	plan this
Douala DLA	Cameroon	Turkish Airlines	1	4,558	plan this
Gorgan GBT	Iran	One Jet	1	2,257	plan this
Isfahan IFN	Iran	One Jet	1	2,251	plan this
Monrovia ROB	Liberia	Turkish Airlines	1	5,489	plan this
N'Djamena NDJ	Chad	Turkish Airlines	1	3,505	plan this
Santiago SCL	Chile	Turkish Airlines	1	13,103	plan this
Sulaymaniyah ISU	Iraq	I A W	1	1,573	plan this

The ten destinations out of IST 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. 70 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from IST

The desk holds the return direction for 182 of the 294 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On 29 of them the return into IST runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Kuwait City (KWI) at 2.4 out a day against 0.43 back, Tehran (IKA) at 14.7 out a day against 2.7 back and Arusha (JRO) at 1.7 out a day against 0.43 back.

It runs the other way as well: İzmir (ADB) files 26.6 a day back into IST against 19.3 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at IST

IST keeps Europe/Istanbul time, an hour behind Dubai all year.

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

The night at IST

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 Amsterdam (AMS) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from IST that lands inside it leaves around 20:43, on a modelled block of 3h 17m. Into London (LHR) the door shuts at 23:30 local, so the last departure from IST that lands inside it leaves around 21:49, on a modelled block of 3h 41m. Into Paris (CDG) the door shuts at 00:00 local, so the last departure from IST that lands inside it leaves around 21:40, on a modelled block of 3h 20m. Those three departure times out of IST 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 IST turns up on the rest of this site

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

The site publishes 54 airport pair pages that start or end at IST, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Istanbul to Cairo (CAI), Istanbul to Baku (GYD) and Istanbul to Athens (ATH).

Eleven of the 346 published hand carry lanes run through this airport: Abu Dhabi to Istanbul, Dubai to Istanbul and Frankfurt to Istanbul. A lane page is the commercial version of the board above, with the customs, the ground legs and the price at IST written out.

Three courier postings name IST as the airport a courier here flies from: Istanbul, Adapazarı and Gebze.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with IST already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 294 destinations above.