SFO San Francisco

How deep the SFO board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from SFO. This reads the same 189 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.

• 92of the 189 destinations are flown by one airline
• 73destinations run less than once a day
• 49destinations have four or more departures a day
• 55%of the destinations name United Airlines, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at SFO

98 airlines appear on the SFO board and they do not hold it evenly. United Airlines is on 104 of the 189 destinations, 55 per cent of them, and on 25 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 585 of the 656.9 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 NetJets Aviation on 49 destinations. 60 of the 98 airlines at SFO 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 104 of the 189 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on an SFO sector is usually another United Airlines 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 SFO than the destination count does.

How much of the SFO board is daily

Of the 189 destinations, 116 are flown at least once a day and 73 are not, 44 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the SFO 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: SFO to Yakima (YKM) 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 138.9 of the 656.9 departures a day, 21.1 per cent of the whole board. The other 184 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at SFO usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Atlanta PDK	the United States	Executive Jet Management	1	3,437	plan this
Atlantic City ACY	the United States	BLK	1	4,113	plan this
Bellingham BLI	the United States	NetJets Aviation	1	1,243	plan this
Billings Metropolitan Area BIL	the United States	PlaneSense	1	1,462	plan this
Chicago/Rockford RFD	the United States	United Airlines	1	2,865	plan this
Colorado Springs COS	the United States	United Airlines	1	1,547	plan this
Denver APA	the United States	NetJets Aviation	1	1,536	plan this
Des Moines DSM	the United States	NetJets Aviation	1	2,487	plan this
Eagle EGE	the United States	VJA	1	1,360	plan this
Fort Worth AFW	the United States	NetJets Aviation	1	2,324	plan this

The ten destinations out of SFO 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. 53 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from SFO

The desk holds the return direction for 99 of the 189 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On five of them the return into SFO runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Doha (DOH) at 0.86 out a day against 0.57 back, Guangzhou (CAN) at 0.43 out a day against 0.29 back and Seoul (ICN) at 7.7 out a day against 5.3 back.

It runs the other way as well: Tokyo (NRT) files 4.7 a day back into SFO against 1.1 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at SFO

SFO keeps America/Los_Angeles time, eleven hours behind Dubai in summer and twelve 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 22:00 at SFO, and a nine to six day at each end does not overlap at all, so an instruction written in Dubai is read here on the following working day unless somebody is woken up.

The night at SFO

10 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 SFO that lands inside it leaves around 04:37, on a modelled block of 10h 53m. Into Frankfurt-am-Main (FRA) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from SFO that lands inside it leaves around 02:29, on a modelled block of 11h 31m. Into Paris (CDG) the door shuts at 00:00 local, so the last departure from SFO that lands inside it leaves around 03:42, on a modelled block of 11h 18m. Those three departure times out of SFO 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 SFO turns up on the rest of this site

SFO carries two other pages on this site as well: the United States country desk, which sets out the customs practice, the working week and the road legs behind this airport and the SFO 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 SFO, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are San Francisco to Los Angeles (LAX), San Francisco to San Diego (SAN) and San Francisco to Seattle (SEA).

Four of the 346 published hand carry lanes run through this airport: Dubai to San Francisco, San Francisco to Taipei and Seoul to San Francisco. A lane page is the commercial version of the board above, with the customs, the ground legs and the price at SFO written out.

17 courier postings name SFO as the airport a courier here flies from: San Jose, Sacramento and Santa Rosa.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with SFO already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 189 destinations above.