Every scheduled domestic passenger flight in Australia for October 2026 is in the map below: 48,209 flights between 93 airports. Each glowing trail is one aircraft in the air, coloured by airline, and the land lightens and darkens as the sun crosses the continent.
Open the map full screen for the best view, especially on a phone.
How to use the map
- Play and speed: the month plays from the early hours of Thursday 1 October. Pick a speed from 5 minutes to 3 hours of flying per second.
- Jump to a day: click or drag along the timeline at the bottom. Each bar is one day’s departures.
- Look closer: drag to rotate, scroll or pinch to zoom, and hover over any aircraft to see its airline, route, departure and arrival times.
- Filter by airline: click an airline in the legend to hide or show its flights.
Watch the morning wave leave the east coast around 6am, then the Perth and Darwin red-eyes cross the country overnight. At 2am on Sunday 4 October the clock jumps an hour as daylight saving starts in New South Wales, Victoria, the ACT, Tasmania and South Australia. Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia stay on standard time.
A month of domestic flying in numbers
- Sydney to Melbourne is the busiest route by a long way: about 4,400 flights in both directions, or roughly 140 a day. Brisbane to Sydney (about 2,430) and Brisbane to Melbourne (about 2,150) come next.
- Sydney is the busiest airport: about 9,750 departures in the month, ahead of Melbourne (7,730), Brisbane (6,320), Perth (3,310) and Adelaide (2,920).
- QantasLink flies the most flights: about 13,190, many of them short regional hops. It’s followed by Virgin Australia (12,170), Jetstar (8,340), Qantas (7,400) and Rex (4,620).
- Almost three in ten flights are turboprops: the smaller dots on regional routes, from Rex’s Saab 340s in country New South Wales to the Cape York and Torres Strait services out of Cairns.
The airlines
The Qantas, Jetstar, Virgin Australia and Rex airline guides cover each carrier’s network, what’s included in the fare and how they rate. When you’re ready to fly, browse the latest domestic deals from Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.
How the map was built
October has only just finished, so no flight-by-flight record of it is public yet. The map is a reconstructed timetable built from the most recent official counts.
- Routes, airlines and flight counts come from the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics’ airline on-time performance data. Its latest release covers September 2026 and lists the number of flights scheduled on every route by every reporting airline. Each count is scaled up to 31 days and by that airline’s change from September to October in 2025.
- Smaller regional routes fall below BITRE’s reporting threshold. Each airline’s remaining flights are spread across its regional network using estimated weekly frequencies. Airnorth doesn’t report to BITRE, so its flights are estimates, and smaller airlines such as Nexus Airlines aren’t shown.
- Departure times are illustrative. Each route gets a daily timetable shaped by the usual morning and evening peaks, with red-eyes from Perth and Darwin, fewer flights on Saturdays and a small share of cancellations and delays.
- Flight times come from the distance and typical jet or turboprop speeds. Westbound flights take longer against the prevailing westerly winds.
So the routes, airlines and monthly volumes follow the real network closely, but individual departure times aren’t the published timetable, and the map shows no flight numbers.