Did you know Portugal manages an Atlantic airspace of more than five million square kilometres?

The Santa Maria Flight Information Region, one of the two managed by Portuguese air navigation provider NAV Portugal, covers 5.18 million square kilometres, including a vast area of the North Atlantic and the Azores archipelago. The Lisbon Flight Information Region, which includes mainland Portugal and the autonomous region of Madeira, covers 671,000 square kilometres.

NAV Portugal's figures for 2024, published in February 2025, show how busy both areas are. The company controlled 917,077 flights under instrument flight rules in Portuguese airspace that year, a new annual record and 7.5% more than in 2023. Of these, 197,897 were in the Santa Maria region, an average of 541 a day, while the Lisbon region handled 719,180, an average of 1,965 a day.

The work is carried out by around 1,000 technical staff, 24 hours a day, every day of the year, from two air traffic control centres in Lisbon and Santa Maria and ten control towers: Lisbon, Porto, Faro, Funchal, Porto Santo, Santa Maria, Ponta Delgada, Horta, Flores and Cascais. Despite the record traffic, NAV Portugal reported that average en-route delay per controlled flight fell to 0.39 minutes.

For travellers, these figures show that a flight over that part of the North Atlantic can be in Portuguese-managed airspace far from any Portuguese coastline. NAV Portugal publishes annual traffic figures, so readers should check its latest release for more recent numbers.