SHA Shanghai

How deep the SHA board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from SHA. This reads the same 60 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 and what the clock here does to a Gulf working day, all of it computed on 2026-09-07 from AeroDataBox scheduled route statistics.

• 20of the 60 destinations are flown by one airline
• 5destinations run less than once a day
• 29destinations have four or more departures a day
• 76.7%of the destinations name China Eastern Airlines, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at SHA

26 airlines appear on the SHA board and they do not hold it evenly. China Eastern Airlines is on 46 of the 60 destinations, 76.7 per cent of them, and on 12 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 389.3 of the 423.4 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 Shanghai Airlines on 34 destinations. 16 of the 26 airlines at SHA 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 46 of the 60 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on an SHA sector is usually another China Eastern 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 SHA than the destination count does.

How much of the SHA board is daily

Of the 60 destinations, 55 are flown at least once a day and 5 are not, 1 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the SHA board is flown 3.9 times 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: SHA to Wuxi (WUX) 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 170.3 of the 423.4 departures a day, 40.2 per cent of the whole board. The other 55 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at SHA usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Wuxi WUX	China	Juneyao Airlines	1	92	plan this
Yining YIN	China	China Eastern Airlines	2	3,756	plan this
Altay AAT	China	China Eastern Airlines	3	3,356	plan this

The three destinations out of SHA 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.

The way back from SHA

The desk holds the return direction for 20 of the 60 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On ten of them the return into SHA runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Kunming (KMG) at 15.3 out a day against 3.7 back, Nanning (NNG) at 5.6 out a day against 2 back and Chengdu (CTU) at 16.1 out a day against 6.1 back.

A return leg thinner than the outbound is the ordinary reason a same day round trip out of SHA turns into an overnight, and it is worth checking on each of those 10 sectors before the courier is committed rather than after.

The clock at SHA

SHA keeps Asia/Shanghai time, four hours ahead of Dubai all year.

When it is 09:00 on a Dubai working morning it is 13:00 at SHA, so a nine to six day at each end overlaps for five hours. A customs question raised in the last four hours of the Dubai afternoon reaches nobody at SHA until the next morning, which is the practical limit on a same day instruction here.

Where SHA turns up on the rest of this site

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

The site publishes 19 airport pair pages that start or end at SHA, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Shanghai to Shenzhen (SZX), Shanghai to Guangzhou (CAN) and Shanghai to Beijing (PEK).

Four courier postings name SHA as the airport a courier here flies from: Hangzhou, Suzhou and Pudong.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with SHA already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 60 destinations above.