SAW Istanbul

How deep the SAW board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from SAW. This reads the same 143 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.

• 65of the 143 destinations are flown by one airline
• 35destinations run less than once a day
• 39destinations have four or more departures a day
• 93.7%of the destinations name Pegasus, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at SAW

16 airlines appear on the SAW board and they do not hold it evenly. Pegasus is on 134 of the 143 destinations, 93.7 per cent of them, and on 56 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 467.2 of the 478.2 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 AJet on 80 destinations. 11 of the 16 airlines at SAW 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 134 of the 143 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on an SAW sector is usually another Pegasus 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 SAW than the destination count does.

How much of the SAW board is daily

Of the 143 destinations, 108 are flown at least once a day and 35 are not, though none of them drops to once a week or less. The median destination on the SAW board is flown about twice 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: SAW to Uralsk (URA) 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 96.2 of the 478.2 departures a day, 20.1 per cent of the whole board. The other 138 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at SAW usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Amasya MZH	Turkiye	Pegasus	2	522	plan this
Kahramanmaraş KCM	Turkiye	Pegasus	2	757	plan this
Sinop NOP	Turkiye	Pegasus	2	495	plan this
Tangier TNG	Morocco	Air Arabia Maroc	2	3,105	plan this
Tuzla TZL	Bosnia and Herzegovina	Pegasus	2	950	plan this
Uralsk URA	Kazakhstan	Pegasus	2	2,048	plan this
Aktyuinsk AKX	Kazakhstan	Pegasus	3	2,388	plan this
Atyrau GUW	Kazakhstan	Pegasus	3	1,920	plan this
Bratislava BTS	Slovakia	Pegasus	3	1,252	the pair page
Bristol BRS	the United Kingdom	Pegasus	3	2,701	plan this

The ten destinations out of SAW 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. 22 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from SAW

The desk holds the return direction for 95 of the 143 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On six of them the return into SAW runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are İzmir (ADB) at 19.9 out a day against 8.1 back, Tangier (TNG) at 0.29 out a day against 0.14 back and Sharjah (SHJ) at 2.7 out a day against 1.6 back.

It runs the other way as well: Belgrade (BEG) files 4 a day back into SAW against 1.4 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at SAW

SAW 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 SAW, so a nine to six day at each end overlaps for eight hours. That is wide enough to settle a customs question at SAW and still make a departure the same day.

The night at SAW

15 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 Düsseldorf (DUS) the door shuts at 22:00 local, so the last departure from SAW that lands inside it leaves around 19:51, on a modelled block of 3h 09m. Into Berlin (BER) the door shuts at 22:00 local, so the last departure from SAW that lands inside it leaves around 20:16, on a modelled block of 2h 44m. Into Stuttgart (STR) the door shuts at 23:30 local, so the last departure from SAW that lands inside it leaves around 21:42, on a modelled block of 2h 48m. Those three departure times out of SAW 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 SAW turns up on the rest of this site

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

The site publishes 32 airport pair pages that start or end at SAW, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Istanbul to Antalya (AYT), Istanbul to İzmir (ADB) and Istanbul to Ankara (ESB).

Four courier postings name SAW as the airport a courier here flies from: Istanbul, Bursa and Adapazarı.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with SAW already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 143 destinations above.