MAD Madrid

How deep the MAD board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from MAD. This reads the same 252 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.

• 113of the 252 destinations are flown by one airline
• 104destinations run less than once a day
• 59destinations have four or more departures a day
• 46.4%of the destinations name Iberia, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at MAD

140 airlines appear on the MAD board and they do not hold it evenly. Iberia is on 117 of the 252 destinations, 46.4 per cent of them, and on 29 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 538.1 of the 720.9 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 Air Europa on 60 destinations. 77 of the 140 airlines at MAD 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 117 of the 252 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on an MAD sector is usually another Iberia 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 MAD than the destination count does.

How much of the MAD board is daily

Of the 252 destinations, 148 are flown at least once a day and 104 are not, 24 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the MAD 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: MAD to West Palm Beach (PBI) 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 109.9 of the 720.9 departures a day, 15.2 per cent of the whole board. The other 247 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at MAD usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Barcelona BLA	Venezuela	LASER Airlines	1	6,850	plan this
Bedford BED	the United States	Linear Air	1	5,490	plan this
Bergen BGO	Norway	AMQ	1	2,283	plan this
Berne BRN	Switzerland	NetJets Europe	1	1,139	plan this
Caen/Carpiquet CFR	France	Evelop Airlines	1	996	plan this
Cartagena de Indias CTG	Colombia	Multiple Solutions Limited	1	7,733	plan this
Cochabamba CBB	Bolivia	BoA	1	9,117	plan this
Dundee DND	the United Kingdom	SGP	1	1,775	plan this
Durham MME	the United Kingdom	Gestair	1	1,566	plan this
Eindhoven EIN	the Netherlands	Ryanair	1	1,398	plan this

The ten destinations out of MAD 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. 73 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from MAD

The desk holds the return direction for 171 of the 252 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On 14 of them the return into MAD runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Gdańsk (GDN) at 1.3 out a day against 0.43 back, Bari (BRI) at 1.3 out a day against 0.57 back and Zanzibar (ZNZ) at 0.29 out a day against 0.14 back.

It runs the other way as well: Barcelona (BCN) files 22.1 a day back into MAD against 14.6 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at MAD

MAD keeps Europe/Madrid time, two hours behind Dubai in summer and three 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 07:00 at MAD, so a nine to six day at each end overlaps for seven hours. That is wide enough to settle a customs question at MAD and still make a departure the same day.

The night at MAD

MAD does not close. The note the desk holds for it, checked 2026-09-07, reads: Operates around the clock. Night departures to the Americas are routine.

18 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 (LHR) the door shuts at 23:30 local, so the last departure from MAD that lands inside it leaves around 22:25, on a modelled block of 2h 05m. Into Amsterdam (AMS) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from MAD that lands inside it leaves around 20:38, on a modelled block of 2h 22m. Into Paris (ORY) the door shuts at 23:30 local, so the last departure from MAD that lands inside it leaves around 21:41, on a modelled block of 1h 49m. Those three departure times out of MAD 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 MAD turns up on the rest of this site

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

The site publishes 55 airport pair pages that start or end at MAD, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Madrid to Lisbon (LIS), Madrid to Rome (FCO) and Madrid to Barcelona (BCN).

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

Eleven courier postings name MAD as the airport a courier here flies from: Madrid, Alcalá de Henares and Móstoles.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with MAD already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 252 destinations above.