Approach and departure direction
Landings — approached from
Take-offs — left toward
Southern approaches, day by day
Landings from the south, by day
Landings by hour, from each direction
Which hour they came, day by day
One cell per hour of each day, one grid per approach direction. The stacked chart above splits the day into five bands, which is as fine as a stack goes before its segments stop being tellable apart; these place every landing in the hour it actually happened — from the south, the north and the east — and a fourth grid gives each hour's wind. The three landing grids share one colour scale, so a cell reads the same on every one. Per-flight from ADS-B, so they exist only from 2026-08-26 — the airport's published bands carry no hour to place. All 24 hours are drawn, curfew included: a landing from the south at 01:00 is the most consequential thing this page could show, and the three grids line up row for row.
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Where Zurich lands, month by month
Share of landings by approach direction
Late-evening landings from the south
Share of arrivals between 22:00 and 24:00 that approached from the south, by month. Comparing the same nine months (October–June) each year, the overall southern share rose too — from 7.3% to 10.0%, then eased to 9.3% — but this one rose more sharply, from 11.9% to 24.3% before easing to 22.8%. 22:00 is the only evening boundary the airport publishes, so a finer cut is not available. The missing month is drawn as a break.
Southern evenings and the wind
Southern approaches by month of year
Share of landings from the south, weighted by movements across all available years rather than averaged over them — July and September each hold a half-month from 2024, and both are among the lowest months, so a per-year average would understate exactly where it would be noticed. A bar resting on fewer complete years than the archive holds for that month says so; the rest are solid across every year on record.
How many southern landings in a day
Departure routes
The standard departure routes the airport files, by letter, across the whole archive. Most letters map to a single compass direction, but N and O each split across two — the great majority northwest, a smaller share filed due north. A handful of route/compass pairs fall under 100 movements and are dropped from the chart.