#Flight time durations full

The 2 hours includes taxi time, and some additional buffer the airlines normally add in. Picking a LAX-ABQ at random, UA6474, FlightAware shows that the average flight time is actually around 1 hour 25 minutes, not 2 hours as you've stated. These will be roughly equivalent for all flights, so are basically a fixed overhead.įor the two flights you've listed, the times you've given are those published by the airline and thus include the time from gate-to-gate, including taxi/etc.

The first is the overhead of take-off, climb, decent and landing. Three are two main factors for the difference between the two flights you've listed. Obviously this doesn't account for prevailing wind patterns, taxi times etc, but it's good enough to be used for flight time estimation by eg. And the 1 hr per 500 mi is simple: jet planes normally cruise at 500 mph. So we lop 25% (5 minutes) off each phase, and ta-da, we only have 30 minutes of entirely wasted time.

#Flight time durations full

If we assume half the time is spent going in the right direction, at on average half the full speed (since the speed is 0 on the ground and max after take off/before descent), this equates to 50% * 50% = 25% of the time flying in the right direction at full speed. The logic behind this is basically that, while take off and landing take around 20 min each, they're not entirely wasted flying in circles around the airport. Mark already explained the why, but there's a simple but rather accurate simple approximation for jet flights: 30 min plus 1 hr per 500 mi flownĬonsider LAX-ABQ: 0:30 + (670/500) = 0:30 + 1:20 = 1:50Īnd ORD-SJC: 0:30 + (1859/500) = 0:30 + 3:43 = 4:13