The sector is held by Air India and SriLankan Airlines.
Airport pair · hand carry reference
CMB Colombo to DEL Delhi
Bandaranaike International, Sri Lanka, to Indira Gandhi International, India. Computed from the scheduled network held on 2026-09-07.
- Nonstop
- 4.4 times a day
- Great circle
- 2,396 km
- Block, estimated
- 3h 34m
- Door to door
- 10h 19m
What CMB to DEL looks like
The CMB to DEL sector, the carriers on it and the flying time, before anything is promised to anybody.
Colombo CMB to Delhi DEL is a medium haul sector of 2,396 km by great circle, flown nonstop 4.4 times a day.
At the cruise speed this site models for 2,396 km, 830 km an hour, and thirty minutes of taxi at the two ends, the flight blocks at about 3h 34m.
Colombo CMB is a mid sized airport in the network held here, 45 scheduled destinations and 93.2 departures a day. Delhi DEL has 133 destinations and 607.8 departures a day.
Delhi carries about 6.5 times the departures of Colombo, so a courier who has to be rebooked has far more to work with at one end of this pair than at the other.
Colombo 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 CMB to DEL from the scheduled route statistics, both directions, with the operating carriers named.
| Direction | Flights a day | Flights a week | Operated by |
|---|---|---|---|
| CMB to DEL | 4.43 | 31 | Air India, SriLankan Airlines |
| DEL to CMB | 4.57 | 32 | Air India, SriLankan Airlines |
Two carriers hold the sector, Air India and SriLankan Airlines, which gives a missed departure somewhere to go without leaving the nonstop.
At 4.4 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 63 departures a week on CMB 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 3h 34m block time on CMB 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 CMB | 90 min | 1h 30m |
| At CMB before departure | 180 min | 4h 30m |
| CMB to DEL in the air, estimated | 214 min | 8h 04m |
| Formalities at DEL | 90 min | 9h 34m |
| Delivery run in Delhi | 45 min | 10h 19m |
| Door to door | 619 min | 10h 19m |
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 CMB to DEL is 10h 19m.
A courier who leaves Colombo at 09:00 local is on the ground in Delhi at about 12:34 local and at the door by 14:49 the same day.
Working backwards from a six in the evening handover in Delhi, the last useful departure from Colombo is around 12:11 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. 36 of them join CMB to DEL.
| Connecting at | CMB to hub, flights a day | Hub to DEL, flights a day | Track, km | Estimated, gate to gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hyderabad HYD | 1.86 | 31.44 | 2,397 | 5h 04m |
| Tiruchirappalli TRZ | 1.29 | 0.71 | 2,406 | 5h 09m |
| Madurai IXM | 1.14 | 0.86 | 2,440 | 5h 11m |
| Chennai MAA | 7.57 | 18.57 | 2,408 | 5h 12m |
| Bangalore BLR | 2.71 | 50.32 | 2,420 | 5h 14m |
| Kochi COK | 1.14 | 9.66 | 2,555 | 5h 22m |
With 4.4 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.
36 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 about once a day.
Through HYD the routing covers 2,397 km against the 2,396 km nonstop track and takes about 5h 04m 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 30m more than the nonstop, which is close enough that a connection is worth taking when the nonstop is full or badly timed.
Behind it, Tiruchirappalli TRZ at 5h 09m and Madurai IXM at 5h 11m hold the same connection, so a booking has three hubs to try before it has to wait for the nonstop.
Plan Colombo 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 CMB 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 CMB airport entry
- The DEL airport entry
- Hand carry into Sri Lanka
- Hand carry into India
- The written lane, Abu Dhabi to Colombo
- The written lane, Colombo to Sharjah
- The written lane, Dubai to Colombo
- The route calculator
More pairs through CMB and DEL: Singapore to Colombo, Colombo to Doha, Kuala Lumpur to Colombo, Frankfurt to Colombo, Colombo to Kuwait City, Colombo to Chennai, Bangkok to Colombo, Mumbai to Colombo.