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Estimate how long a flight between two cities takes and what time it lands in local time, from the great-circle distance, a typical cruise speed for the aircraft type, and allowances for taxi, climb, descent and routing.
Choose where you fly from and to, the local departure date and time, and the kind of aircraft, and the calculator estimates the flight duration and the arrival time on the destination's clock. It starts from the great-circle distance between the two cities, adds 5% because real airways are never perfectly straight, divides by a typical cruise speed (900 km/h for a wide-body jet, 840 km/h for a narrow-body jet, 500 km/h for a turboprop) and adds half an hour for taxiing, climbing and descending. The arrival time is shown in the destination's time zone with daylight saving time applied, with +1 or −1 when the flight lands on a different calendar day than it left. Use it to plan connections, pick a sensible arrival hour or check whether an airline's schedule includes a lot of padding; it does not know about winds, so eastbound and westbound times come out the same.
Where:
A wide-body jet from London to New York, leaving at 10:00 London time (BST, UTC+1) on 2 June 2025. The great-circle distance is 5,570.24 km and New York is on EDT (UTC−4).
Add 5% for routing
Time in the air at 900 km/h
Add half an hour for taxi, climb and descent
Arrival: 10:00 BST is 09:00 UTC; 16:00 UTC is 12:00 EDT
Result
The flight takes about 7h 0m and lands at 12:00 New York time on the same day; New York is 5 hours behind London on that date.
For the 5,570 km great-circle distance on a wide-body jet the calculator estimates 7h 0m: 5,570 km plus 5% is 5,849 km, which takes 6.5 hours at 900 km/h, plus 30 minutes on the ground and in the climb and descent. Leaving London at 10:00 on 2 June 2025 you land at 12:00 New York time, because New York is 5 hours behind. Scheduled westbound flights are usually listed at 7h 30m to 8h 30m because of headwinds over the Atlantic.
The arrival time is shown on the destination's clock. Leaving New York at 19:00 for London, a 7-hour flight lands at 07:00 London time the next day, shown as +1. Flying east across the date line works the other way: a 14h 35m flight leaving Sydney at 10:00 on a Monday lands in Los Angeles at 07:35 on the same Monday, earlier on the clock than it took off.
The calculator has no wind model, so it gives the same air time in both directions. In reality the jet stream blows from west to east at mid-latitudes, often at 150 to 300 km/h, so eastbound flights across the Atlantic or Pacific are commonly 45 to 90 minutes shorter than westbound ones. Treat the estimate as an average of the two directions.
The 30 minutes is a fixed allowance for taxiing out and in, the climb to cruising altitude and the descent and approach, when the aircraft is slower than its cruise speed. The 5% covers routing: aircraft follow airways, avoid restricted airspace and line up with runways, so the distance flown is longer than the great circle. On a 344 km hop such as London to Paris the fixed half hour dominates: a narrow-body jet comes out at 56 minutes.
Long-haul routes over about 5,000 km are mostly flown by wide-body jets such as the Boeing 777 or Airbus A350, cruising near 900 km/h. Short and medium routes use narrow-body jets such as the A320 or 737, at about 840 km/h. Turboprops such as the ATR 72 or Dash 8 fly regional routes at about 500 km/h, so the same 344 km trip takes 1h 13m instead of 56 minutes.
The time difference is worked out for the departure date, so daylight saving time is included. Europe and North America change their clocks on different weekends, so for a few weeks in March and in October or November London is 4 hours ahead of New York instead of 5. Southern-hemisphere cities change clocks in the opposite season, so the gap between Sydney and Los Angeles moves between 17, 18 and 19 hours over the year.
Pick the two cities, the local departure date and time, and the aircraft type to estimate the flight duration and local arrival time.