SOF Sofia

How deep the SOF board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from SOF. This reads the same 95 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.

• 58of the 95 destinations are flown by one airline
• 50destinations run less than once a day
• 3destinations have four or more departures a day
• 45.3%of the destinations name Ryanair, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at SOF

37 airlines appear on the SOF board and they do not hold it evenly. Ryanair is on 43 of the 95 destinations, 45.3 per cent of them, and on 22 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 47.8 of the 107 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 Wizz Air on 34 destinations. 27 of the 37 airlines at SOF 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 43 of the 95 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on an SOF sector is usually another Ryanair 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 SOF than the destination count does.

How much of the SOF board is daily

Of the 95 destinations, 45 are flown at least once a day and 50 are not, 7 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the SOF board is flown 6 times a week.

An average of 0.14 flights a day is the schedule statistic, and it is worth translating it before anything is promised to anybody: SOF to Stockholm (BMA) 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 21.3 of the 107 departures a day, 19.9 per cent of the whole board. With 52.6 per cent of the 95 destinations running less than daily, this is a board that rewards booking the outbound before the collection is confirmed rather than after.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Bodrum BJV	Turkiye	Bulgaria Air	1	706	plan this
Cincinnati CVG	the United States	Atlas Air	1	8,397	plan this
Dalaman DLM	Turkiye	Bulgaria Air	1	809	plan this
Giza SPX	Egypt	Bulgaria Air	1	1,550	plan this
Ibiza Town IBZ	Spain	HLR	1	1,898	plan this
Plovdiv PDV	Bulgaria	Bulgaria Air	1	137	plan this
Stockholm BMA	Sweden	UNI	1	1,890	plan this
Baden-Baden FKB	Germany	Ryanair	2	1,365	plan this
Birmingham BHX	the United Kingdom	Ryanair	2	2,161	the pair page
Bristol BRS	the United Kingdom	Ryanair	2	2,187	plan this

The ten destinations out of SOF 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. 36 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from SOF

The desk holds the return direction for 72 of the 95 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On three of them the return into SOF runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Istanbul (IST) at 3.9 out a day against 2.4 back, Hurghada (HRG) at 0.43 out a day against 0.29 back and Leipzig (LEJ) at 1 out a day against 0.71 back.

It runs the other way as well: Sharm el Sheikh (SSH) files 0.86 a day back into SOF against 0.57 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at SOF

SOF keeps Europe/Sofia time, an hour behind Dubai in summer and two 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 08:00 at SOF, so a nine to six day at each end overlaps for eight hours. That is wide enough to settle a customs question at SOF and still make a departure the same day.

The night at SOF

14 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 Vienna (VIE) the door shuts at 23:30 local, so the last departure from SOF that lands inside it leaves around 22:58, on a modelled block of 1h 32m. Into Frankfurt-am-Main (FRA) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from SOF that lands inside it leaves around 21:43, on a modelled block of 2h 17m. Into Munich (MUC) the door shuts at 22:00 local, so the last departure from SOF that lands inside it leaves around 21:06, on a modelled block of 1h 54m. Those three departure times out of SOF 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 SOF turns up on the rest of this site

The airport also sits behind the Bulgaria country desk, which sets out the customs practice, the working week and the road legs behind this airport.

The site publishes 7 airport pair pages that start or end at SOF, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Sofia to Tel Aviv Yafo (TLV), Sofia to Eindhoven (EIN) and Sofia to Cologne (CGN).

Five courier postings name SOF as the airport a courier here flies from: Sofia, Plovdiv and Pleven.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with SOF already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 95 destinations above.