The sector is held by Air China and Sichuan Airlines.
Airport pair · hand carry reference
CTU Chengdu to NKG Nanjing
Chengdu Tianfu, China, to Nanjing Lukou, China. Computed from the scheduled network held on 2026-09-07.
- Nonstop
- 12.3 times a day
- Great circle
- 1,424 km
- Block, estimated
- 2h 19m
- Door to door
- 9h 04m
What CTU to NKG looks like
The CTU to NKG sector, the carriers on it and the flying time, before anything is promised to anybody.
Chengdu CTU to Nanjing NKG is a medium haul sector of 1,424 km by great circle, flown nonstop 12.3 times a day.
At the cruise speed this site models for 1,424 km, 830 km an hour, and thirty minutes of taxi at the two ends, the flight blocks at about 2h 19m.
Chengdu CTU is a mid sized airport in the network held here, 67 scheduled destinations and 357.2 departures a day. Nanjing NKG has 85 destinations and 360.8 departures a day.
Chengdu and Nanjing keep the same clock all year, so the arrival time is the departure time plus the block and nothing else.
The pair sits inside Asia Pacific, a corridor where the site already publishes 16 written lanes that go into customs and ground detail this page does not.
Who flies the sector, and how often
Average daily frequencies on CTU to NKG from the scheduled route statistics, both directions, with the operating carriers named.
| Direction | Flights a day | Flights a week | Operated by |
|---|---|---|---|
| CTU to NKG | 12.29 | 86 | Air China, Sichuan Airlines |
| NKG to CTU | 0 | 0 | none held |
Two carriers hold the sector, Air China and Sichuan Airlines, which gives a missed departure somewhere to go without leaving the nonstop.
The return leg NKG to CTU carries no scheduled nonstop at all, so a courier coming back does it with a connection.
At 12.3 times a day there is usually another departure within a few hours, which is what makes a same day booking on this pair realistic.
Between them the two directions put about 86 departures a week on CTU to NKG, which is the number that decides whether a seat can be found today or on Thursday.
The clock from collection to signature
The same ground timings the route calculator starts from, applied to the 2h 19m block time on CTU to NKG. Change any of them in the tool further down and the total moves with them.
| Stage | Allowed | Elapsed |
|---|---|---|
| Collection and the run to CTU | 90 min | 1h 30m |
| At CTU before departure | 180 min | 4h 30m |
| CTU to NKG in the air, estimated | 139 min | 6h 49m |
| Formalities at NKG | 90 min | 8h 19m |
| Delivery run in Nanjing | 45 min | 9h 04m |
| Door to door | 544 min | 9h 04m |
On the desk standard ground timings, ninety minutes to collect and reach the airport, three hours at the airport before departure, ninety minutes of arrival formalities and a forty five minute delivery run, the door to door figure for CTU to NKG is 9h 04m.
A courier who leaves Chengdu at 09:00 local is on the ground in Nanjing at about 11:19 local and at the door by 13:34 the same day.
Working backwards from a six in the evening handover in Nanjing, the last useful departure from Chengdu is around 13:26 local.
When the nonstop does not work
Every airport that joins the two ends, ranked by when they land, among the ones whose weaker leg is dependable enough to plan on. Connection time is allowed for the size of the hub. 17 of them join CTU to NKG.
| Connecting at | CTU to hub, flights a day | Hub to NKG, flights a day | Track, km | Estimated, gate to gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Changsha CSX | 10.43 | 5.71 | 1,609 | 4h 26m |
| Xiamen XMN | 6.86 | 9.86 | 2,353 | 5h 01m |
| Fuzhou FOC | 5.86 | 4.57 | 2,272 | 5h 01m |
| Shanghai PVG | 8.43 | 2.43 | 1,991 | 5h 06m |
| Nanning NNG | 1.43 | 7.29 | 2,445 | 5h 07m |
| Guangzhou CAN | 23.43 | 26.14 | 2,301 | 5h 12m |
With 12.3 times a day on the nonstop, a connection here is a disruption plan rather than a routing, and it is listed because a closed runway or a cancellation wave is exactly when nobody has time to work it out.
17 airports connect the two ends on the scheduled network held here. The quickest of the dependable ones is Changsha CSX, where the weaker of the two legs still runs 5.7 times a day.
Through CSX the routing covers 1,609 km against the 1,424 km nonstop track and takes about 4h 26m in the air and on the ground at the hub, allowing 75 minutes to connect at an airport of that size.
That is only 2h 07m more than the nonstop, which is close enough that a connection is worth taking when the nonstop is full or badly timed.
Behind it, Xiamen XMN at 5h 01m and Fuzhou FOC at 5h 01m hold the same connection, so a booking has three hubs to try before it has to wait for the nonstop.
If nothing suitable leaves Chengdu, Chengdu TFU is 56 km away by great circle and carries 173 scheduled destinations of its own, which is usually a shorter road transfer than a lost day.
If nothing suitable leaves Nanjing, Hangzhou HGH is 225 km away by great circle and carries 117 scheduled destinations of its own, which is usually a shorter road transfer than a lost day.
Plan Chengdu to Nanjing yourself
The same tool the dispatchers use, open to anybody and free. It is loaded with this pair already. Change either end, add a stopover or a preferred airline, and it works out the connection, the transit and the door to door clock, with the real departures underneath. Put it on your own site if it is useful to you.
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Restrictions
Where this came from, and where to look next
- Carriers and frequencies: AeroDataBox scheduled route statistics, retrieved 2026-09-07. Average daily flights, not a timetable.
- Distances: great circle from published coordinates. They read short against a flown track, which is why the block time above applies a factor to them.
- Block and connection times: the same model the route calculator lower down this page runs, at the same rounding.
- Restrictions: the airport notes file, checked 2026-09-07.
- Industrial sites: public company information. Nothing here says or implies that any company named is a customer of any courier operator.
Who publishes this. OnBoard Courier is a placement desk in Dubai. An assignment is carried out by a vetted partner operator, with the desk as the single point of contact from the quote to the signature. This page exists because our own dispatchers need the answer for CTU to NKG in the twenty minutes before a promise is made, and a reference only one operator can read is not a reference. Free to read, quote and cite. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it.
If you need something moved rather than looked up, the desk prices a hand carry in fifteen minutes.
More pairs through CTU and NKG: Chengdu to Beijing, Shenzhen to Chengdu, Chengdu to Guangzhou, Shanghai to Chengdu, Chengdu to Hong Kong, Taipei to Chengdu, Chengdu to Tianjin, Chengdu to Hangzhou.