Use this flight arrival time calculator to work out what the local clock will say when you land, whether you arrive on the same day, and how far your watch has to move. It handles daylight saving at both ends and the date line automatically.
Flight Arrival Time Calculator
Enter your departure airport, arrival airport and local departure time.
Result summary
Why arrival times are easy to get wrong
Adding a flight time to a departure time works only when both ends share a clock. They rarely do. The answer depends on the offset in force at each airport on that specific date, and offsets move when daylight saving starts or ends.
The trap is that the two ends do not change together. The United Kingdom and the United States shift their clocks on different weekends, so for two weeks each spring and autumn the gap between London and New York is four hours rather than five. A flight planned in that window lands an hour away from where mental arithmetic puts it.
Southern hemisphere destinations invert the problem. When London moves into British Summer Time, Sydney is leaving daylight saving, so the gap between the two swings by two hours across a few weeks.
How the calculation works
Your local departure time is converted to UTC using the offset in force at the departure airport on that date. The flight time is added in UTC. The result is converted back using the offset in force at the arrival airport at the moment of arrival, which is not always the same offset the departure airport had.
Working through UTC is why the international date line needs no special handling. Crossing it westbound loses a calendar day and crossing it eastbound gains one, and both fall out of the offsets on their own.
Offsets and daylight saving rules come from the IANA Time Zone Database that your browser already carries, read through the standard Intl date formatting interface. Nothing is downloaded and no rules are hardcoded on this page, so a country that changes its clock policy is corrected by your browser rather than by us.
Two edge cases, and what this page does with them
When clocks go back, one local hour happens twice. A departure time inside that hour is ambiguous, and this page takes the first occurrence.
When clocks go forward, one local hour does not exist. A departure time inside that gap cannot happen, and this page moves it forward to the first valid instant rather than reporting an error.
Both cases are rare in real bookings, because airlines avoid scheduling departures across a transition. They are stated here because a calculator that silently picks one of two answers is worse than one that tells you which it picked.
How the flight time is estimated
If you have the flight time on your booking, switch the dropdown to enter it and the arrival time is then exact arithmetic on your own number. If you do not, the estimate divides the great-circle distance plus the 8% routing uplift by the cruise speed you pick, then adds 30 minutes on the ground.
A London to New York trip at 840 km/h estimates around eight hours, which is close to the scheduled westbound time and roughly an hour long for the eastbound leg, because no wind is modelled. Use the booking figure where the answer matters.
Frequently asked questions
Does this handle daylight saving?
Yes, at both ends and on the actual travel date. The result panel shows the offset used at each airport, so you can see when a clock change has moved the answer.
Why does it say I arrive two days later?
Long westbound flights over the international date line can do that. Leaving Los Angeles late in the evening for Sydney crosses both midnight and the date line, so the calendar advances twice.
Can I arrive before I left?
By the clock, yes. An eastbound crossing of the date line, such as Sydney to Los Angeles, can land at a local time earlier on the same calendar day as departure. The elapsed flight time is unchanged.
Is the estimated flight time reliable?
It is a planning estimate with no wind in it. Scheduled times published by the airline account for wind, routing and typical taxi delays, so prefer those and use the manual option.
Which airports are included?
1,148 airports classified as large with scheduled service, each carrying an IATA code and a time zone derived from its coordinates.
What should I do about jet lag?
Once you know the local arrival time and the size of the clock change, use the Jet Lag Recovery Calculator to estimate how long adjustment takes.
