The sector is held by AJet and Pegasus.
Airport pair · hand carry reference
SAW Istanbul to TBS Tbilisi
Sabiha Gokcen, Türkiye, to Tbilisi International, Georgia. Computed from the scheduled network held on 2026-09-07.
- Nonstop
- 5.3 times a day
- Great circle
- 1,308 km
- Block, estimated
- 2h 10m
- Door to door
- 8h 55m
What SAW to TBS looks like
The SAW to TBS sector, the carriers on it and the flying time, before anything is promised to anybody.
Istanbul SAW to Tbilisi TBS is a medium haul sector of 1,308 km by great circle, flown nonstop 5.3 times a day.
At the cruise speed this site models for 1,308 km, 830 km an hour, and thirty minutes of taxi at the two ends, the flight blocks at about 2h 10m.
Istanbul SAW is a large airport in the network held here, 143 scheduled destinations and 478.2 departures a day. Tbilisi TBS has 72 destinations and 84 departures a day.
Istanbul carries about 5.7 times the departures of Tbilisi, so a courier who has to be rebooked has far more to work with at one end of this pair than at the other.
Tbilisi is one hour ahead of Istanbul all year.
The pair sits inside Europe, a corridor where the site already publishes 14 written lanes that go into customs and ground detail this page does not.
Who flies the sector, and how often
Average daily frequencies on SAW to TBS from the scheduled route statistics, both directions, with the operating carriers named.
| Direction | Flights a day | Flights a week | Operated by |
|---|---|---|---|
| SAW to TBS | 5.29 | 37 | AJet, Pegasus |
| TBS to SAW | 5.29 | 37 | AJet, Pegasus |
Two carriers hold the sector, AJet and Pegasus, which gives a missed departure somewhere to go without leaving the nonstop.
At 5.3 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 74.1 departures a week on SAW to TBS, 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 10m block time on SAW to TBS. Change any of them in the tool further down and the total moves with them.
| Stage | Allowed | Elapsed |
|---|---|---|
| Collection and the run to SAW | 90 min | 1h 30m |
| At SAW before departure | 180 min | 4h 30m |
| SAW to TBS in the air, estimated | 130 min | 6h 40m |
| Formalities at TBS | 90 min | 8h 10m |
| Delivery run in Tbilisi | 45 min | 8h 55m |
| Door to door | 535 min | 8h 55m |
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 SAW to TBS is 8h 55m.
A courier who leaves Istanbul at 09:00 local is on the ground in Tbilisi at about 12:10 local and at the door by 14:25 the same day.
Working backwards from a six in the evening handover in Tbilisi, the last useful departure from Istanbul is around 12:35 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. 37 of them join SAW to TBS.
| Connecting at | SAW to hub, flights a day | Hub to TBS, flights a day | Track, km | Estimated, gate to gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yerevan EVN | 1.14 | 1 | 1,452 | 3h 54m |
| Antalya AYT | 25.29 | 2 | 1,790 | 4h 38m |
| Baku GYD | 5.71 | 7.71 | 2,192 | 4h 53m |
| Athens ATH | 1.57 | 1.86 | 2,403 | 5h 26m |
| Belgrade BEG | 1.43 | 0.71 | 2,872 | 5h 55m |
| Moscow VKO | 5.43 | 6 | 3,380 | 6h 19m |
With 5.3 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.
37 airports connect the two ends on the scheduled network held here. The quickest of the dependable ones is Yerevan EVN, where the weaker of the two legs still runs about once a day.
Through EVN the routing covers 1,452 km against the 1,308 km nonstop track and takes about 3h 54m 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 44m more than the nonstop, which is close enough that a connection is worth taking when the nonstop is full or badly timed.
Behind it, Antalya AYT at 4h 38m and Baku GYD at 4h 53m 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.
If nothing suitable leaves Tbilisi, Yerevan EVN is 176 km away by great circle and carries 82 scheduled destinations of its own, which is usually a shorter road transfer than a lost day.
Plan Istanbul to Tbilisi 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.
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 SAW to TBS 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 SAW airport entry
- The TBS airport entry
- Hand carry into Türkiye
- Hand carry into Georgia
- The written lane, Sharjah to Tbilisi
- The route calculator
More pairs through SAW and TBS: Dusseldorf to Istanbul, Dubai to Istanbul, Berlin to Istanbul, Jeddah to Istanbul, Stuttgart to Istanbul, Istanbul to Sharjah, Prague to Istanbul, Hamburg to Istanbul.