Flight Time Calculator

This calculator estimates how long a flight takes from the route distance, the aircraft's cruise speed and the wind. It returns gate-to-gate time, time at cruise, the resulting ground speed, the distance in kilometers and how many minutes the wind adds or saves.

Use it to sanity-check a published schedule, plan a private or charter flight, estimate a connection, or understand why the same route is faster one way than the other. It works for any aircraft: enter about 500 mph for a typical airliner, less for a turboprop.

The estimate assumes the plane flies the whole distance at one speed, with the slower climb and descent covered by the fixed allowance. Real flights also follow airways rather than a straight line, may hold before landing and vary with daily winds, so treat the result as within about 15–30 minutes on a long-haul route. To turn the duration into a local arrival time, use the time zone difference calculator; to plan your recovery afterwards, the jet lag calculator.

This is the basic time-speed-distance relationship used in flight planning, simplified to a single cruise segment. Although the speed box is labeled ground speed, enter the speed through the air: the calculator adds the wind to it. Airline flight plans also account for winds at each altitude, step climbs and the actual routing, which is usually a few percent longer than the great-circle distance. Distances in nautical miles can be converted with 1 nm = 1.15078 statute miles; knots to mph uses the same factor.

Approximate true airspeeds at normal cruising altitude. Airlines often fly slightly slower than the maximum to save fuel.

The jet stream is a band of strong westerly wind at airliner cruising heights, typically strongest in winter. Flights heading east ride it, and flights heading west either fight it or route around it. On busy oceanic routes such as the North Atlantic, the daily tracks are moved to take advantage of it, which is why the same flight can vary by 30 minutes or more from one day to the next.

• A tailwind adds to ground speed and shortens the flight; the calculator's "time saved" line shows by how much.
• A headwind subtracts from ground speed; the time-saved figure turns negative.
• Crosswinds at cruise barely change the duration, so leave them out.

Published airline schedules are "block times" from pushback to arrival at the gate. They usually include extra padding for congestion, so arriving early is common. Times printed on a ticket are also local times at each airport, so a flight east across several time zones can appear to take much longer than it really does. For the carbon emissions of a trip, the carbon footprint calculator works from the same distance.