Passengers
18,903
Christchurch to Cairns, 12 months to Jun 2026
Christchurch to Cairns
New Zealand · 193 months of data from Mar 1988 · Cairns to Christchurch
Both directions
41,152
including Cairns to Christchurch
Flight time
5h 45m
scheduled, gate to gate
Load factor
67%
seats filled on this leg
Traffic: 12 months to Jun 2026
18,903 passengers flew Christchurch to Cairns in the 12 months to Jun 2026, out of 41,152 on the route in both directions. Traffic leans outbound: 22,249 departing against 18,903 arriving. Flights Christchurch to Cairns run 67% full, against 77% coming back.
Passenger history milestones
Recorded milestones use this city-pair passenger series, with both directions combined. A first positive record is not a service-launch date; complete calendar years require all twelve observed, non-null months.
First positive passenger record
Mar 1988
first recorded month with passengers > 0
Peak complete year
1991
12,820 passengers
Latest complete year
2002
3,248 passengers
The route
Distances are true from Cairns; the ring marks the distance to Christchurch.
How long is the flight?
Scheduled flight time from Christchurch to Cairns is 5h 45m gate to gate, over 3,882 km.
Scheduled block time — gate to gate, not time in the air — taken from the current timetable for this leg. Long-haul flights are often timetabled differently in each direction because of winds aloft, so the return is not always the same length. Check your own booking for the flight you are taking.
Flight numbers on this route
1 flight number currently scheduled from Christchurch to Cairns. These are the numbers you book under.
Not a daily service — this week it is scheduled on Mon and Fri (2 departures).
Jetstar · 1 · Airbus A320
JQ136
Current timetable as at 2026-09-06
Timetables change, and these carry no punctuality figures of their own — no on-time data is published for international flights at all. The passenger and load factor figures above cover the route, not any single flight number.
Passengers, 1988 to 2026
Gaps indicate missing observations, not zero values.
To Jun 2026 · Marks show industry events
How full were the flights?
Inbound load factor, read as a floor rather than an exact figure. Some flights on this pair also carried passengers to and from other cities, and their seats cannot be split between those journeys. Dividing by every seat on every aircraft that touched the route gives the lowest the true figure can be, so actual occupancy is at or above the line. Seat data begins in 2009, so this series is shorter than the passenger chart above.
Load factor: seats data from 2009
Freight
Tonnes of air freight carried on this route — a dimension the domestic data does not have at all.
Gaps indicate missing observations, not zero values.
To Jun 2026
The route in numbers
| Busiest month on record | 3,922 · Mar 2026 |
| Data coverage | Mar 1988 – Jun 2026 (193 months) |
| Freight, 12 months to Jun 2026 | 0 tonnes |
| Destination region | New Zealand |
No punctuality data is published for international services, so there are no cancellation or on-time figures on this page. That series covers domestic routes only.