SYD Sydney

How deep the SYD board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from SYD. This reads the same 92 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.

• 42of the 92 destinations are flown by one airline
• 30destinations run less than once a day
• 27destinations have four or more departures a day
• 62%of the destinations name Qantas, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at SYD

70 airlines appear on the SYD board and they do not hold it evenly. Qantas is on 57 of the 92 destinations, 62 per cent of them, and on 12 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 396.7 of the 432.7 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 26 destinations. 51 of the 70 airlines at SYD 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 57 of the 92 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on an SYD sector is usually another Qantas 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 SYD than the destination count does.

How much of the SYD board is daily

Of the 92 destinations, 62 are flown at least once a day and 30 are not, 6 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the SYD 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: SYD to Zhengzhou (CGO) 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 185.2 of the 432.7 departures a day, 42.8 per cent of the whole board. The other 87 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at SYD usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Babolsar BBL	Iran	Skytrans	1	12,857	plan this
Chongqing CKG	China	Tianjin Airlines	1	8,485	the pair page
Narrabri NAA	Australia	FlyPelican	1	423	plan this
Qingdao TAO	China	Beijing Capital Airlines	1	8,457	plan this
Wuhan WUH	China	China Eastern Airlines	1	8,176	the pair page
Zhengzhou CGO	China	Tianjin Airlines	1	8,549	plan this
Broome BME	Australia	Qantas	2	3,378	plan this
Hamilton HLZ	New Zealand	Jetstar	2	2,212	plan this
Mexico City MEX	Mexico	Aeromexico	2	12,983	the pair page
Nuku'alofa TBU	Tonga	Qantas	2	3,585	plan this

The ten destinations out of SYD 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. 17 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from SYD

The desk holds the return direction for 51 of the 92 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On four of them the return into SYD runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Nanjing (NKG) at 0.57 out a day against 0.14 back, Xiamen (XMN) at 0.86 out a day against 0.43 back and Abu Dhabi (AUH) at 1.3 out a day against 0.86 back.

It runs the other way as well: Guangzhou (CAN) files 4 a day back into SYD against 2.3 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at SYD

SYD keeps Australia/Sydney 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 SYD, 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 SYD is briefed the day before rather than on the morning it flies.

The night at SYD

SYD carries a documented restriction, checked 2026-09-07. Curfew between 23:00 and 06:00 local. Jet departures are not permitted in that window and a late departure waits until morning. That is a hole of seven hours in the middle of the night. A movement that misses the last slot before 23:00 does not go until 06:00, and the courier spends the night here rather than at the other end.

1 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 Adelaide (ADL) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from SYD that lands inside it leaves around 21:31, on a modelled block of 1h 59m. Those one departure times out of SYD 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 SYD turns up on the rest of this site

SYD 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 SYD transit page for the connecting case, where a courier changes aircraft here rather than starting or finishing.

The site publishes 40 airport pair pages that start or end at SYD, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Sydney to Melbourne (MEL), Sydney to Brisbane City (BNE) and Sydney to Gold (OOL).

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

Five courier postings name SYD as the airport a courier here flies from: Newcastle, Central Coast and Wollongong.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with SYD already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 92 destinations above.