Live departure crowding at Zurich Airport. A departure board tells you when flights leave. It cannot tell you that four of them leave within twenty minutes of each other, which is what actually fills a terminal.
The load curve is relative, not a headcount: every flight is weighted equally, so 100% is simply the busiest minute of the day shown. A day of small propliners and a day of full charters look the same — what the curve tells you is when the building fills up, not by how much. Times are shown in the airport's own timezone. Data refreshes every 5 minutes.
We have logged 3,979 departures from Zurich over 9 days of recording, about 443 a day, reaching 388 destinations.
The busiest hour for departures is typically 12:00–13:00 in Zurich local time. Passengers for those flights are in the terminal for hours beforehand, which is what the curve above the board shows.
From our own record of this airport's board, 2026-08-20 onwards. Updated continuously.
Each bar is one departing flight, drawn across the hours its passengers are inside the building: from when they typically turn up — three hours before departure, by default — until boarding closes half an hour before it. Both of those are yours to change. Where bars overlap, those passengers are in the terminal at the same time, and the curve underneath counts them minute by minute. Its highest point is the busiest moment of the day: the time to avoid, or the time to aim for if you would rather queue for nothing.
40 airports across 19 countries, from the Nordics to Hong Kong — see the full list.