Flight Time Between Cities: 31 Schedules Checked Against the Maths

By Lokesh RathoreUpdated 23 Aug 2026 · 11 min read

Every flight-time page on the internet gives you an estimate. Almost none of them tell you how wrong it is. That always seemed backwards, so this page does the other thing: it publishes the estimate and the airline's published schedule side by side, and the gap between them, for every route in the table.

The method is deliberately dull, because it has to be reproducible. The distance is the great-circle distance between the two airports, computed with the haversine formula from their coordinates in this site's 5,519-airport dataset. The estimate divides that by an average 800 km/h and adds 30 minutes of ground time, which is exactly what the calculator does. The published schedule is the airline's own block time, gate to gate, collected by hand on 23 August 2026; the source for every row is linked in the table itself. The difference column is simply the second minus the first.

What we found

• The estimate is honest, but it runs slightly fast. The median route is scheduled +12 minutes longer than the maths predicts. 22 of the 31 routes are scheduled longer than the estimate; only 9 are scheduled shorter.
• The ±15% claim holds up. This site has always said its estimates land within about 15% of a real schedule. Measured against 31 actual timetables, that is true 90% of the time. We would rather publish the three misses than quietly drop them.
• Short hops are the least reliable, proportionally. Delhi to Kathmandu is only 14 minutes off, but on a 1h 31m flight that is 15%. The fixed 30-minute ground allowance is a big share of a short flight and a rounding error on a long one.

The one result worth stopping on

Look at London. Delhi is 6,731 km from Heathrow. Mumbai is 7,213 km — Delhi is nearly 500 kilometres closer. Yet Air India schedules its Delhi–Heathrow flight at 11h 05m and its Mumbai–Heathrow flight at 9h 40m. The shorter route takes 85 minutes longer.

What is going on is airspace. Pakistan closed its airspace to Indian carriers in April 2025 and the ban has been extended repeatedly since; it was still in force through 2026. The direct track from Delhi to Europe runs straight over Pakistan, so Air India has to detour, and reporting on the closure puts the cost at roughly one to three extra hours on affected routes. Mumbai is much less affected, because its westbound track already runs out over the Arabian Sea. And the ban applies only to Indian carriers, which is why British Airways can fly the longest of these three routes on close to the great-circle time.

On the closure and its cost to Indian carriers: AirlineRatings and Skift. The distances and percentages above are our own, computed from the dataset.

The full comparison: 31 routes

Sorted by distance. Green means the estimate is inside ±15% of the published schedule; amber means it is not. Every published time links to the schedule source it was read from.

Schedules are seasonal. These are the northern-summer timetables current on 23 August 2026; several lengthen by 10–25 minutes in the winter season, and airlines retime flights constantly. Routes we could not verify to the minute were left out rather than guessed — Delhi–New York is absent because Air India's AI 101 was routing via Rome when we checked, so it is not a nonstop to compare.

Quick reference: routes without a schedule attached

These tables are estimate-only, generated live from the same engine, for the pairs people look up most. Treat them as the maths, not as a timetable — the comparison above is your guide to how far off they are likely to be.

Within India

Nothing here crosses a meaningful time zone, so the arrival clock reads much as you would expect.

India to the Gulf

The busiest international corridor out of India. Everything here is a short hop and the clocks barely shift. There is a fuller look at this corridor in the Kerala to Gulf guide.

India to Asia

Kathmandu and Colombo are shorter than some domestic flights; the Southeast Asian hubs sit in an easy four-to-six hour band.

India to Europe, the Americas and Australia

The long ones. This is where a nonstop genuinely earns its premium over a one-stop, and where the airspace detour above bites hardest.

Famous long-haul pairs

The marquee routes that turn up in every ranking, for scale.

A shortcut for estimating in your head

Once you know the distance you barely need a tool. A jet averages close to 800 kilometres an hour, so every 800 km on the map is roughly an hour in the air, plus about half an hour of ground time. A 2,400 km trip is about three hours and a bit; a 6,400 km one is around eight and a half. Given what the table above shows, add another 10 to 15 minutes for a long-haul schedule and rather more if you are flying an Indian carrier towards Europe.

When a city has more than one airport

London has Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted; New York has JFK, Newark and LaGuardia; Tokyo has Haneda and Narita. The flight time barely changes between them, because the airports sit only a few kilometres apart. What changes is how far you then are from where you are actually going, so check which airport your ticket uses before you sort out the taxi. In the calculator you can pick the exact airport by its code.

Look up any pair yourself

The tables cover the routes people ask about most; the tool covers every airport in the dataset. Put two cities or their codes into the flight time calculator and you get the distance, the estimate and the local time you would land. If you would rather think in broad bands than exact pairs, the companion guide on how long a flight takes sorts the world into four tiers, and the full working behind the model is in how flight time is calculated.