Skardu and Gilgit flights
The northern flights cancel, and the call comes late. What the official traffic figures show, and what to do the morning it does not go.
Almost everything written about these flights was written by someone selling you a tour that includes one. This page is about the morning it doesn't go.
It looks like this. You're at Islamabad domestic before dawn, the board says the flight is on time, everybody in the queue is cheerful about the window seat. Then a man walks over and tells the queue, not the room, that Skardu is closed. There's no announcement, no rebooking desk and nobody whose job it is to fix your week. You're outside in the car park with a decision to make and the sun not properly up.
The two routes are not equivalent
People talk about these two as a pair. They aren't. The official traffic figures make the difference plain, and they are in the table below: Skardu handles several times Gilgit's passenger volume and roughly double its aircraft movements.
What that means on the ground is that Skardu is the established route flown with larger aircraft, and Gilgit is the small, weather-exposed one where a bad forecast ends the discussion early. If your plan can take either, back Skardu. It's an odd thing to recommend about the airport that is further away, and we recommend it anyway.
Why they cancel
Both are visual approaches into high terrain. The decision therefore depends on the weather at both ends and on everything in between, and it gets taken late, sometimes with the aircraft already on the stand. A clear morning in Islamabad tells you very little. We've been turned back under a blue sky in the capital because of cloud sitting in a valley we couldn't see from the lounge.
What to actually do about it
Don't book a same-day onward connection. Not a trek start, not a jeep, not a hotel you can't cancel. This is the single most expensive mistake available here, and people make it every season because the flight is short and the schedule looks so tidy on paper.
Stay somewhere cancellable the night before. You want to be close in, and you want to be able to walk away from the booking at the desk without an argument. See one night before flying north.
Know the road figures before you need them. Islamabad to Skardu has them. Learn them the week before, not while standing in the concourse on a dying phone, because the decision to switch has to be made early in the morning or you lose the following day too.
Consider waiting a day rather than driving immediately. It sounds like the wrong answer and often isn't. The road crosses an advisory zone that the flight doesn't, and if your insurance is advisory-linked that difference may matter more than the day. Weather that shuts the airfield one morning has frequently lifted by the next.
What we don't know yet
We have the official passenger and movement figures and that's genuinely all we have. We don't have the cancellation rate itself, we don't have the rebooking mechanics when it happens, and we don't know whether a non-Pakistani card reliably completes a booking. We're not going to guess at any of it. Those stay open questions until one of us has been through the whole thing with a notebook and can write down what happened.