MLE Male

How deep the MLE board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from MLE. This reads the same 38 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.

• 31of the 38 destinations are flown by one airline
• 18destinations run less than once a day
• 5destinations have four or more departures a day
• 39.5%of the destinations name Maldivian, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at MLE

30 airlines appear on the MLE board and they do not hold it evenly. Maldivian is on 15 of the 38 destinations, 39.5 per cent of them, and on 11 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 24.3 of the 60.9 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 IndiGo on 3 destinations. 24 of the 30 airlines at MLE 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.

That is a middling concentration at MLE: one airline on 39.5 per cent of the destinations and the other 60.5 per cent spread across 29 airlines. A cancellation inside the Maldivian network is often survivable inside the same booking, but on the 23 destinations Maldivian does not touch, a rebooking means moving to a carrier the desk has to check for a through fare first.

How much of the MLE board is daily

Of the 38 destinations, 20 are flown at least once a day and 18 are not, 1 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the MLE 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: MLE to Astana (NQZ) 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 27.7 of the 60.9 departures a day, 45.5 per cent of the whole board. The other 33 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at MLE usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Astana NQZ	Kazakhstan	Air Astana	1	5,211	plan this
Dhaka DAC	Bangladesh	Maldivian	2	2,837	the pair page
Hong Kong HKG	Hong Kong	Homer Air	2	4,789	plan this
Jeddah JED	Saudi Arabia	Saudi Arabian Airlines	2	4,184	plan this
Melbourne MEL	Australia	Maldivian	2	8,671	the pair page
Rome FCO	Italy	Neos	2	7,344	plan this
Zurich ZRH	Switzerland	Edelweiss Air	2	7,804	plan this
Kunming KMG	China	China Eastern Airlines	3	3,906	plan this
New Delhi DEL	India	Air India	3	2,737	plan this
Riyadh RUH	Saudi Arabia	flynas	3	3,681	the pair page

The ten destinations out of MLE 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. 6 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from MLE

The desk holds the return direction for 29 of the 38 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On three of them the return into MLE runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Beijing (PEK) at 0.29 out a day against 0.14 back, Melbourne (MEL) at 0.29 out a day against 0.14 back and Rome (FCO) at 0.29 out a day against 0.14 back.

It runs the other way as well: Dhaka (DAC) files 0.86 a day back into MLE against 0.29 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at MLE

MLE keeps Indian/Maldives time, an hour ahead of Dubai all year.

When it is 09:00 on a Dubai working morning it is 10:00 at MLE, so a nine to six day at each end overlaps for eight hours. That is wide enough to settle a customs question at MLE and still make a departure the same day.

The night at MLE

2 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 MLE that lands inside it leaves around 16:43, on a modelled block of 10h 47m. Into Zurich (ZRH) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from MLE that lands inside it leaves around 16:06, on a modelled block of 9h 54m. Those two departure times out of MLE 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 MLE turns up on the rest of this site

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

The site publishes 9 airport pair pages that start or end at MLE, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Male to Colombo (CMB), Male to Dubai (DXB) and Male to Kuala Lumpur (KUL).

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

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with MLE already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 38 destinations above.