5/17 Lisbon Airport (early flights)
Flight boarding at 6:45 this morning. We arrived at 4:00 AM. That gave us 2.75 hours to make it through the maze to our international gate. No bags to check. TL;DR Took us 30 minutes to make it through ticketing, scanners, and passport control.
At that hour, it took us 25 minutes to make it to the airport from the hotel. Our driver said by 6am that time can really start to increase. In the airport, ticked verification took 5 minutes. The longest line was at the xray machines. That took about 10-15 minutes.
Note: flights start leaving at 5 AM with 27 flights departing between 5 AM and 7 AM. So, yes, there are a fair number of people here at that hour.
However, there are less international flights out of the North Gates where passport control is needed. At 4:00-4:30 this morning there was only manual passport control. But the line was a steady 10 people long and the wait was 5 minutes. 4-5 officers were working at that hour.
Sadly, I have no information about lines after 4:30. (Once you pass through a checkpoint it’s impossible to know the queue leading to it)…. Except to say that things were (generally) getting more busy behind me.
There is coffee and muffins and such at 4:30 in the North Terminal next to gate 41. Lovely little stop.
Good luck!
EDIT: my husband made a ticktock on the different lanes and the process of you want to see video!