MEL Melbourne

How deep the MEL board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from MEL. This reads the same 69 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.

• 34of the 69 destinations are flown by one airline
• 27destinations run less than once a day
• 18destinations have four or more departures a day
• 46.4%of the destinations name Qantas, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at MEL

52 airlines appear on the MEL board and they do not hold it evenly. Qantas is on 32 of the 69 destinations, 46.4 per cent of them, and on 6 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 304.1 of the 343.8 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 Jetstar on 27 destinations. 37 of the 52 airlines at MEL 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 32 of the 69 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on an MEL sector is usually another Qantas aircraft, and when there is not one the desk is looking at another airport rather than another airline. No alternate airport within road reach is held for MEL, so that second look is a longer road leg or a different day.

How much of the MEL board is daily

Of the 69 destinations, 42 are flown at least once a day and 27 are not, 5 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the MEL 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: MEL to Wellcamp (WTB) 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 174.4 of the 343.8 departures a day, 50.7 per cent of the whole board. More than half of everything that leaves MEL is aimed at those five places, so the depth on the board above is thinner than the destination count suggests, and a hand carry that is not going to one of them is planned around a single departure time.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Cooma OOM	Australia	Qantas	1	397	plan this
Dubbo DBO	Australia	Fly Corporate	1	695	plan this
Hangzhou HGH	China	Beijing Capital Airlines	1	7,966	the pair page
Malé MLE	Maldives	Maldivian	1	8,671	the pair page
Wellcamp WTB	Australia	YUL	1	1,298	plan this
Nanjing NKG	China	China Eastern Airlines	2	8,176	the pair page
Qingdao TAO	China	Beijing Capital Airlines	2	8,617	plan this
Chengdu TFU	China	Sichuan Airlines	3	8,647	the pair page
Dallas-Fort Worth DFW	the United States	Qantas	3	14,475	plan this
Phuket HKT	Thailand	Jetstar	3	7,013	the pair page

The ten destinations out of MEL 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. 16 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from MEL

The desk holds the return direction for 46 of the 69 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On two of them the return into MEL runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Phuket (HKT) at 0.43 out a day against 0.29 back and Los Angeles (LAX) at 2.7 out a day against 1.9 back.

It runs the other way as well: Guangzhou (CAN) files 3 a day back into MEL against 1.7 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at MEL

MEL keeps Australia/Melbourne time, six hours ahead of Dubai in summer and seven hours ahead 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 15:00 at MEL, so a nine to six day at each end overlaps for three hours. That is a narrow window for a signature, a customs query or an authority to release, and it is the reason a consignment for MEL is briefed the day before rather than on the morning it flies.

The night at MEL

3 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 Sydney (SYD) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from MEL that lands inside it leaves around 21:28, on a modelled block of 1h 32m. Into Adelaide (ADL) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from MEL that lands inside it leaves around 22:03, on a modelled block of 1h 27m. Into Tokyo (NRT) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from MEL that lands inside it leaves around 13:39, on a modelled block of 10h 21m. Those three departure times out of MEL 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 MEL turns up on the rest of this site

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

The site publishes 34 airport pair pages that start or end at MEL, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Melbourne to Sydney (SYD), Melbourne to Brisbane City (BNE) and Melbourne to Adelaide (ADL).

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

Seven courier postings name MEL as the airport a courier here flies from: Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with MEL already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 69 destinations above.