A route calculator for OBC desks, including the ones competing with us

Why an operator would publish this

The obvious question first, because a dispatcher at a competing desk will ask it before reading anything else. We built the calculator for our own people. Keeping it private would have saved us nothing: the schedule is not ours, the coordinates are not ours, and the arithmetic is the same arithmetic every desk in this trade does by hand. What publishing costs us is a server. What it buys is that the numbers this industry checks against are the ones we maintain, and that people who are careful about routings have a reason to know our name.

So it answers identically for everybody. There is no degraded free tier, no form in front of the result, and no quiet limit after a number of searches. Use it against us in a bid. That is a fair use of it and we would rather be the reference than the gatekeeper.

What it computes

Two airports, optionally a date, an intermediate point and a preferred carrier. It returns the nonstop where one exists, and one stop routings ranked by how often the weaker of the two sectors runs, because the weaker leg is what decides whether a same day connection holds. Under each routing it puts a door to door clock broken into five stages: collection, the airport before departure, the flight, arrival formalities and the delivery run.

The network behind it is 3,083 airports and 38,042 directed pairs, of which 571 carry enough scheduled traffic to be a sensible origin. Alongside the calculator we publish 565 airport entries, 4,372 airport pair pages, 158 transit hubs and 346 priced lanes, all readable without an account.

The models, in full, so you can disagree with them

A tool that hides its assumptions is not useful to a professional. Ours are these.

Distance is great circle between published coordinates. Exact as a great circle and always shorter than a flown track, so the time model multiplies it by 1.06 before it converts. Cruise is taken at 720 km/h below 800 km, 830 up to 3,000 km and 880 above, plus thirty minutes on the ground for taxi at both ends. Connection time scales with the size of the transit airport: an hour at a small field, seventy five minutes at a medium one, ninety at a major hub, because a wide body arriving at a terminal you then have to leave and re-enter is not a forty minute walk.

Ground time defaults to ninety minutes for collection, three hours at the airport before departure, ninety minutes for arrival formalities and forty five for the delivery run, and every one of those is yours to change on the page. Three hours before departure is not caution. An export declaration and a manual check in for a consignment that is not ordinary baggage take longer than a boarding pass, and a desk that budgets ninety minutes there will eventually miss a flight.

The two things that quietly ruin a routing

Neither shows up in a schedule search, and both are the reason a routing that looked fine at four in the afternoon is a diversion by midnight.

Night restrictions. We hold operating notes for 31 airports, of which 20 carry a defined curfew window. Frankfurt takes no scheduled movement between 23:00 and 05:00, and a late evening departure that slips past that is not late, it is tomorrow. Give the calculator a departure time and it will hide the routings whose computed departure or arrival falls inside a window you have asked it to avoid.

The duty day. A courier is a person. A routing that has them collecting at five in the morning and signing at midnight is legal on paper and unreliable in practice, so anything over sixteen hours from collection to signature is flagged rather than quietly offered. If your own desk does not model this, it is the single cheapest improvement you can make.

The deadline calculation, which is the one dispatchers use

Give it the hour the consignment has to be there and it works backwards: the latest moment collection can still happen, and how much slack is left. A negative number is an honest answer and considerably more useful than a routing that looks workable until somebody adds up the hours. It is the difference between telling a client "yes, if the box is with us by two" and telling them "yes" and finding out at eight.

What it refuses to do

It will not build a two stop routing. That is deliberate. Two changes on a hand carry means two chances to lose the consignment and a duty day that usually will not fit, so those are built by hand against a specific consignment rather than generated. When the calculator finds nothing with one change, that is the honest answer, and a person takes it from there.

It will not tell you a visa or an immigration rule. We hold no immigration data and will not guess at one, so where the question arises the page names the country and says the desk checks it. It will not price anything either. A price depends on the consignment, the carrier's acceptance and the day, and a calculator that pretended otherwise would be lying to both of us.

Put it on your own site

Two lines of HTML. An empty element where the tool should sit, and the loader once on the same page:

A page about one lane should not ask its reader to type that lane in, so the element takes data-from and data-to as IATA codes and opens with the routing already calculated. The frame carries our mark and a link back, and that is the whole of the licence fee. It sets no cookie, stores nothing in your visitor's browser and sends us no identifier; the host name of the page is passed so we can see which sites use it, and that is all we learn. The full terms and a live preview are on the embed page.

Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it

Scheduled networks, operating carriers and frequencies come from AeroDataBox route statistics, and the line under the calculator carries the date they were last checked. Live departures are read from the same source through our server, which is why your visitors never talk to a third party. Airport names and coordinates are our own reference list, published as JSON. Route networks move slowly, a handful of changes a season at most airports, so a figure a few weeks old is still a good planning figure.

Quote it, cite it, build against it. If you find a number that is wrong, tell us and we will correct the entry rather than argue about it, because a reference nobody can correct is not a reference. The desk reads that address.

And if you would rather not route it yourself

We are a placement desk in Dubai and we work with other operators regularly, in both directions. If a lane lands on your desk that you cannot cover, or you need somebody at the other end of one of ours, the desk answers with a flight and a price in about fifteen minutes. Nothing on this page depends on that. Open the route calculator, or start from the airport atlas if you want the network before the routing.