The sector is held by Air Arabia Egypt, AJet, Nesma Airlines, Nile Air and Pegasus.
Airport pair · hand carry reference
CAI Cairo to SAW Istanbul
Cairo International, Egypt, to Sabiha Gokcen, Türkiye. Computed from the scheduled network held on 2026-09-07.
- Nonstop
- 3.6 times a day
- Great circle
- 1,213 km
- Block, estimated
- 2h 03m
- Door to door
- 8h 48m
What CAI to SAW looks like
The CAI to SAW sector, the carriers on it and the flying time, before anything is promised to anybody.
Cairo CAI to Istanbul SAW is a medium haul sector of 1,213 km by great circle, flown nonstop 3.6 times a day.
At the cruise speed this site models for 1,213 km, 830 km an hour, and thirty minutes of taxi at the two ends, the flight blocks at about 2h 03m.
Cairo CAI is a large airport in the network held here, 105 scheduled destinations and 311.7 departures a day. Istanbul SAW has 143 destinations and 478.2 departures a day.
Istanbul runs one hour ahead of Cairo in January and no time shift at all in July, because the two ends do not change their clocks together.
The pair sits between Africa and Europe, a corridor where the site already publishes 8 written lanes that go into customs and ground detail this page does not.
Who flies the sector, and how often
Average daily frequencies on CAI to SAW from the scheduled route statistics, both directions, with the operating carriers named.
| Direction | Flights a day | Flights a week | Operated by |
|---|---|---|---|
| CAI to SAW | 3.57 | 25 | Air Arabia Egypt, AJet, Nesma Airlines, Nile Air |
| SAW to CAI | 3.43 | 24 | Air Arabia Egypt, AJet, Nesma Airlines, Nile Air, Pegasus |
5 carriers are recorded on the sector, so a missed departure is normally a rebooking rather than a lost day.
At 3.6 times a day there is usually another departure within a few hours, which is what makes a same day booking on this pair realistic.
Between them the two directions put about 49 departures a week on CAI to SAW, which is the number that decides whether a seat can be found today or on Thursday.
The clock from collection to signature
The same ground timings the route calculator starts from, applied to the 2h 03m block time on CAI to SAW. Change any of them in the tool further down and the total moves with them.
| Stage | Allowed | Elapsed |
|---|---|---|
| Collection and the run to CAI | 90 min | 1h 30m |
| At CAI before departure | 180 min | 4h 30m |
| CAI to SAW in the air, estimated | 123 min | 6h 33m |
| Formalities at SAW | 90 min | 8h 03m |
| Delivery run in Istanbul | 45 min | 8h 48m |
| Door to door | 528 min | 8h 48m |
On the desk standard ground timings, ninety minutes to collect and reach the airport, three hours at the airport before departure, ninety minutes of arrival formalities and a forty five minute delivery run, the door to door figure for CAI to SAW is 8h 48m.
A courier who leaves Cairo at 09:00 local is on the ground in Istanbul at about 12:03 local and at the door by 14:18 the same day.
Working backwards from a six in the evening handover in Istanbul, the last useful departure from Cairo is around 12:42 local.
When the nonstop does not work
Every airport that joins the two ends, ranked by when they land, among the ones whose weaker leg is dependable enough to plan on. Connection time is allowed for the size of the hub. 49 of them join CAI to SAW.
| Connecting at | CAI to hub, flights a day | Hub to SAW, flights a day | Track, km | Estimated, gate to gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ankara ESB | 0.86 | 18.57 | 1,445 | 3h 55m |
| Beirut BEY | 6.57 | 5.57 | 1,520 | 4h 03m |
| Amman AMM | 9.43 | 1.14 | 1,654 | 4h 13m |
| Sharm El Sheikh SSH | 6.86 | 3.71 | 1,886 | 4h 29m |
| Athens ATH | 6.29 | 1.57 | 1,673 | 4h 30m |
| Hurghada HRG | 5 | 3.71 | 1,982 | 4h 37m |
With 3.6 times a day on the nonstop, a connection here is a disruption plan rather than a routing, and it is listed because a closed runway or a cancellation wave is exactly when nobody has time to work it out.
49 airports connect the two ends on the scheduled network held here. The quickest of the dependable ones is Ankara ESB, where the weaker of the two legs still runs 6 times a week.
Through ESB the routing covers 1,445 km against the 1,213 km nonstop track and takes about 3h 55m in the air and on the ground at the hub, allowing 60 minutes to connect at an airport of that size.
That is only 1h 52m more than the nonstop, which is close enough that a connection is worth taking when the nonstop is full or badly timed.
Behind it, Beirut BEY at 4h 03m and Amman AMM at 4h 13m hold the same connection, so a booking has three hubs to try before it has to wait for the nonstop.
If nothing suitable leaves Istanbul, Istanbul IST is 63 km away by great circle and carries 294 scheduled destinations of its own, which is usually a shorter road transfer than a lost day.
Plan Cairo to Istanbul yourself
The same tool the dispatchers use, open to anybody and free. It is loaded with this pair already. Change either end, add a stopover or a preferred airline, and it works out the connection, the transit and the door to door clock, with the real departures underneath. Put it on your own site if it is useful to you.
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Restrictions
Where this came from, and where to look next
- Carriers and frequencies: AeroDataBox scheduled route statistics, retrieved 2026-09-07. Average daily flights, not a timetable.
- Distances: great circle from published coordinates. They read short against a flown track, which is why the block time above applies a factor to them.
- Block and connection times: the same model the route calculator lower down this page runs, at the same rounding.
- Restrictions: the airport notes file, checked 2026-09-07.
- Industrial sites: public company information. Nothing here says or implies that any company named is a customer of any courier operator.
Who publishes this. OnBoard Courier is a placement desk in Dubai. An assignment is carried out by a vetted partner operator, with the desk as the single point of contact from the quote to the signature. This page exists because our own dispatchers need the answer for CAI to SAW in the twenty minutes before a promise is made, and a reference only one operator can read is not a reference. Free to read, quote and cite. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it.
If you need something moved rather than looked up, the desk prices a hand carry in fifteen minutes.
- The CAI airport entry
- The SAW airport entry
- Hand carry into Egypt
- Hand carry into Türkiye
- The written lane, Cairo to Athens
- The written lane, Cairo to Sharjah
- The written lane, Sharjah to Cairo
- The route calculator
More pairs through CAI and SAW: Jeddah to Cairo, Cairo to Dubai, Cairo to Riyadh, Cairo to Abu Dhabi, Frankfurt to Cairo, Cairo to Milan, Cairo to Doha, Istanbul to Cairo.