NBO Nairobi

How deep the NBO board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from NBO. This reads the same 59 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.

• 38of the 59 destinations are flown by one airline
• 23destinations run less than once a day
• 12destinations have four or more departures a day
• 62.7%of the destinations name Kenya Airways, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at NBO

42 airlines appear on the NBO board and they do not hold it evenly. Kenya Airways is on 37 of the 59 destinations, 62.7 per cent of them, and on 18 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 110.6 of the 148.6 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 Jambojet Limited on 6 destinations. 30 of the 42 airlines at NBO 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 37 of the 59 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on an NBO sector is usually another Kenya 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 NBO than the destination count does.

How much of the NBO board is daily

Of the 59 destinations, 36 are flown at least once a day and 23 are not, 2 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the NBO 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: NBO to Nampula (APL) 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 53.6 of the 148.6 departures a day, 36 per cent of the whole board. The other 54 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at NBO usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Dakar DSS	Senegal	Talon Air	1	6,200	plan this
Nampula APL	Mozambique	Kenya Airways	1	1,555	plan this
Ndola NLA	Zambia	Kenya Airways	2	1,592	plan this
Abidjan ABJ	Cote d'Ivoire	Kenya Airways	3	4,596	plan this
Lubumbashi FBM	the Democratic Republic of the Congo	Kenya Airways	3	1,543	plan this
Muscat MCT	Oman	SalamAir	3	3,606	plan this
Victoria Falls VFA	Zimbabwe	Kenya Airways	3	2,224	plan this
Changsha CSX	China	China Southern Airlines	4	8,738	plan this
Dzaoudzi DZA	Mayotte	Kenya Airways	4	1,574	plan this
Guangzhou CAN	China	China Southern Airlines	4	8,679	plan this

The ten destinations out of NBO 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. 12 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from NBO

The desk holds the return direction for 49 of the 59 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On eight of them the return into NBO runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Jeddah (JED) at 2.1 out a day against 1 back, Brussels (BRU) at 1.1 out a day against 0.57 back and Paris (CDG) at 3.6 out a day against 2 back.

It runs the other way as well: Zanzibar (ZNZ) files 7.5 a day back into NBO against 5.3 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at NBO

NBO keeps Africa/Nairobi time, an hour behind Dubai all year.

When it is 09:00 on a Dubai working morning it is 08:00 at NBO, so a nine to six day at each end overlaps for eight hours. That is wide enough to settle a customs question at NBO and still make a departure the same day.

The night at NBO

5 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 Paris (CDG) the door shuts at 00:00 local, so the last departure from NBO that lands inside it leaves around 16:41, on a modelled block of 8h 19m. Into London (LHR) the door shuts at 23:30 local, so the last departure from NBO that lands inside it leaves around 16:46, on a modelled block of 8h 44m. Into Amsterdam (AMS) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from NBO that lands inside it leaves around 15:27, on a modelled block of 8h 33m. Those three departure times out of NBO 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 NBO turns up on the rest of this site

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

The site publishes 10 airport pair pages that start or end at NBO, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Nairobi to Kampala (EBB), Nairobi to Dar es Salaam (DAR) and Nairobi to Kigali (KGL).

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

Two courier postings name NBO as the airport a courier here flies from: Nairobi and Nakuru.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with NBO already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 59 destinations above.