LHR London

How deep the LHR board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from LHR. This reads the same 212 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.

• 142of the 212 destinations are flown by one airline
• 44destinations run less than once a day
• 60destinations have four or more departures a day
• 67.5%of the destinations name British Airways, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at LHR

87 airlines appear on the LHR board and they do not hold it evenly. British Airways is on 143 of the 212 destinations, 67.5 per cent of them, and on 78 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 652.8 of the 758.3 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 Virgin Atlantic on 22 destinations. 57 of the 87 airlines at LHR 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 143 of the 212 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on an LHR sector is usually another British Airways 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 LHR than the destination count does.

How much of the LHR board is daily

Of the 212 destinations, 168 are flown at least once a day and 44 are not, 6 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the LHR board is flown about twice 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: LHR to Tunis (TUN) 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 89.4 of the 758.3 departures a day, 11.8 per cent of the whole board. The other 207 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at LHR usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Buenos Aires EZE	Argentina	British Airways	1	11,137	plan this
Georgetown GCM	Cayman Islands	British Airways	1	7,719	plan this
Haikou HAK	China	Hainan Airlines	1	9,640	plan this
Luxor LXR	Egypt	EgyptAir	1	4,005	plan this
St. George ANU	Antigua and Barbuda	Virgin Atlantic	1	6,553	plan this
Tunis TUN	Tunisia	Tunisair	1	1,831	plan this
Changsha CSX	China	Hainan Airlines	2	9,055	plan this
Ho Chi Minh City SGN	Vietnam	Vietnam Airlines	2	10,219	plan this
Lahore LHE	Pakistan	Pakistan International Airlines	2	6,315	plan this
Ponta Delgada PDL	Portugal	British Airways	2	2,493	plan this

The ten destinations out of LHR 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. 33 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from LHR

The desk holds the return direction for 154 of the 212 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On twelve of them the return into LHR runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Leipzig (LEJ) at 0.86 out a day against 0.14 back, Reykjavik (KEF) at 3.4 out a day against 1.1 back and Vancouver (YVR) at 3.4 out a day against 1.1 back.

It runs the other way as well: Milan (MXP) files 3.9 a day back into LHR against 0.43 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at LHR

LHR keeps Europe/London 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 LHR, 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 LHR until the next morning, which is the practical limit on a same day instruction here.

The night at LHR

LHR carries a documented restriction, checked 2026-09-07. A night quota system limits movements between 23:30 and 06:00 local. Very few scheduled departures in that window. That is a hole of six and a half hours in the middle of the night. A movement that misses the last slot before 23:30 does not go until 06:00, and the courier spends the night here rather than at the other end.

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 Amsterdam (AMS) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from LHR that lands inside it leaves around 20:57, on a modelled block of 1h 03m. Into Frankfurt-am-Main (FRA) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from LHR that lands inside it leaves around 20:32, on a modelled block of 1h 28m. Into Munich (MUC) the door shuts at 22:00 local, so the last departure from LHR that lands inside it leaves around 19:18, on a modelled block of 1h 42m. Those three departure times out of LHR 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 LHR turns up on the rest of this site

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

The site publishes 55 airport pair pages that start or end at LHR, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are London to Dublin (DUB), London to Amsterdam (AMS) and London to Munich (MUC).

17 of the 346 published hand carry lanes run through this airport: Abu Dhabi to London, Cape Town to London and Doha to London. A lane page is the commercial version of the board above, with the customs, the ground legs and the price at LHR written out.

22 courier postings name LHR as the airport a courier here flies from: Reading, Brighton and Southampton.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with LHR already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 212 destinations above.