FTCfly is a free, independent tool that estimates how long a flight between two airports should take. You get the great-circle distance, a realistic time estimate, and the exact local time you would land at the other end.
Why I made this
Hi, I'm Lokesh. FTCfly started as an itch. Every time I wanted a quick sense of how long a flight would take, I either got a lone number with no working shown, or had to wade through a booking site to dig it out. So I built the tool I wanted to use. It shows you how it reaches the number, it is honest that the figure is an estimate, and it answers the things I actually wonder about before a trip: what time I land locally, how big the time-zone jump is, how rough the jet lag might be, and roughly how much CO₂ the flight burns.
How I keep this accurate
I am not an airline pilot or a travel agent. What I can promise instead is that the numbers and the facts here are checked rather than guessed. The flight times come straight from the tool's own distance-and-speed method, so they are consistent and reproducible. For the written guides, I work from primary sources: airline and airport pages, civil-aviation and insurance regulators, and reputable aviation reporting, and I link them in the posts so you can see where a claim comes from. Where the facts change, as routes and rules often do, I update the pages and date them. If you ever spot something out of date or wrong, tell me and I will fix it.
How it actually works
For two airports, the tool measures the shortest distance over the curved Earth (the great-circle distance) from their coordinates, divides it by an average cruise speed of about 800 km/h, and adds around 30 minutes for taxiing, take-off, climb, descent and landing. It then converts the arrival into the destination's local time using the full IANA time-zone database, so daylight saving and "you land the next day" are handled for you.
Because it uses a straight-line distance and an average speed, the number is an estimate, usually within about 15% of the real schedule. Winds (mainly the jet stream), the exact route air-traffic control gives the flight, the aircraft type and any connections all push the real time around. I explain the full method on the disclaimer page.
Where the numbers come from
None of this is guesswork dressed up as data. The airport names, cities and coordinates come from the OpenFlights database, an open dataset published under the ODbL licence. The time-zone conversions use the IANA time-zone database, the same reference operating systems and programming languages rely on, which is what lets the tool handle daylight saving and date changes correctly. The day-or-night indicator at your arrival is worked out from standard sunrise equations for the airport's coordinates and time, and the rough carbon figure uses published per-passenger emission factors. If I ever spot an airport with the wrong location or a missing entry, I fix the data directly, so the results only get more accurate over time.
What FTCfly is not
The limits matter as much as the features. FTCfly is not a booking site, and it does not sell tickets or read live schedules, so it will not tell you which specific flight to catch or what it costs. It does not track delays or real-time positions. It gives you the honest underlying estimate, the distance, the likely time in the air and the local arrival, so you can plan around it. For the exact departure and the fare, you still go to an airline or a booking site; the idea here is that you arrive there already knowing roughly what the flight involves.
How FTCfly stays free
I run this on my own. Some outbound links, for things like eSIMs, travel insurance or airport transfers, may be affiliate links that earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. That never touches the flight-time numbers, which are pure maths. The disclaimer and privacy policy spell this out.
Who's behind it
Say hello
Found a wrong airport, a strange result, or have an idea to make the tool better? I read every message. My email is on the contact page.