The sector is held by Air India and IndiGo.
Airport pair · hand carry reference
MAA Chennai to DEL Delhi
Chennai International, India, to Indira Gandhi International, India. Computed from the scheduled network held on 2026-09-07.
- Nonstop
- 18.6 times a day
- Great circle
- 1,761 km
- Block, estimated
- 2h 45m
- Door to door
- 9h 30m
What MAA to DEL looks like
The MAA to DEL sector, the carriers on it and the flying time, before anything is promised to anybody.
Chennai MAA to Delhi DEL is a medium haul sector of 1,761 km by great circle, flown nonstop 18.6 times a day.
At the cruise speed this site models for 1,761 km, 830 km an hour, and thirty minutes of taxi at the two ends, the flight blocks at about 2h 45m.
Chennai MAA is a mid sized airport in the network held here, 58 scheduled destinations and 160.7 departures a day. Delhi DEL has 133 destinations and 607.8 departures a day.
Delhi carries about 3.8 times the departures of Chennai, so a courier who has to be rebooked has far more to work with at one end of this pair than at the other.
Chennai and Delhi 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 MAA to DEL from the scheduled route statistics, both directions, with the operating carriers named.
| Direction | Flights a day | Flights a week | Operated by |
|---|---|---|---|
| MAA to DEL | 18.57 | 130 | Air India, IndiGo |
| DEL to MAA | 18.15 | 127 | Air India, IndiGo |
Two carriers hold the sector, Air India and IndiGo, which gives a missed departure somewhere to go without leaving the nonstop.
At 18.6 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 257 departures a week on MAA to DEL, 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 45m block time on MAA to DEL. Change any of them in the tool further down and the total moves with them.
| Stage | Allowed | Elapsed |
|---|---|---|
| Collection and the run to MAA | 90 min | 1h 30m |
| At MAA before departure | 180 min | 4h 30m |
| MAA to DEL in the air, estimated | 165 min | 7h 15m |
| Formalities at DEL | 90 min | 8h 45m |
| Delivery run in Delhi | 45 min | 9h 30m |
| Door to door | 570 min | 9h 30m |
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 MAA to DEL is 9h 30m.
A courier who leaves Chennai at 09:00 local is on the ground in Delhi at about 11:45 local and at the door by 14:00 the same day.
Working backwards from a six in the evening handover in Delhi, the last useful departure from Chennai is around 13:00 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. 40 of them join MAA to DEL.
| Connecting at | MAA to hub, flights a day | Hub to DEL, flights a day | Track, km | Estimated, gate to gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hyderabad HYD | 9.29 | 31.44 | 1,775 | 4h 22m |
| Jaipur JAI | 1.14 | 6 | 1,836 | 4h 23m |
| Indore IDR | 1 | 10.31 | 1,839 | 4h 29m |
| Lucknow LKO | 0.71 | 14.2 | 1,956 | 4h 34m |
| Bangalore BLR | 14.71 | 50.32 | 1,978 | 4h 35m |
| Pune PNQ | 6.71 | 28.25 | 2,070 | 4h 39m |
With 18.6 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.
40 airports connect the two ends on the scheduled network held here. The quickest of the dependable ones is Hyderabad HYD, where the weaker of the two legs still runs 9.3 times a day.
Through HYD the routing covers 1,775 km against the 1,761 km nonstop track and takes about 4h 22m in the air and on the ground at the hub, allowing 60 minutes to connect at an airport of that size.
That is only 1h 37m more than the nonstop, which is close enough that a connection is worth taking when the nonstop is full or badly timed.
Behind it, Jaipur JAI at 4h 23m and Indore IDR at 4h 29m hold the same connection, so a booking has three hubs to try before it has to wait for the nonstop.
Plan Chennai to Delhi 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 MAA to DEL 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.
- The MAA airport entry
- The DEL airport entry
- Hand carry into India
- The written lane, Chennai to Stuttgart
- The written lane, Dubai to Chennai
- The written lane, Abu Dhabi to Delhi
- The route calculator
More pairs through MAA and DEL: London to Delhi, Bangalore to Delhi, Mumbai to Delhi, Paris to Delhi, Singapore to Delhi, Amsterdam to Delhi, Hyderabad to Delhi, Zurich to Delhi.