The sector is held by Air France.
Airport pair · hand carry reference
LYS Lyon to NCE Nice
Lyon Saint-Exupery, France, to Nice Cote d'Azur, France. Computed from the scheduled network held on 2026-09-07.
- Nonstop
- About once a day
- Great circle
- 285 km
- Block, estimated
- 55 min
- Door to door
- 7h 40m
What LYS to NCE looks like
The LYS to NCE sector, the carriers on it and the flying time, before anything is promised to anybody.
Lyon LYS to Nice NCE is a short sector of 285 km by great circle, flown nonstop about once a day.
At the cruise speed this site models for 285 km, 720 km an hour, and thirty minutes of taxi at the two ends, the flight blocks at about 55 min.
Lyon LYS is a large airport in the network held here, 122 scheduled destinations and 152.8 departures a day. Nice NCE has 116 destinations and 207 departures a day.
Lyon and Nice keep the same clock all year, so the arrival time is the departure time plus the block and nothing else.
The pair sits inside Europe, a corridor where the site already publishes 14 written lanes that go into customs and ground detail this page does not.
Who flies the sector, and how often
Average daily frequencies on LYS to NCE from the scheduled route statistics, both directions, with the operating carriers named.
| Direction | Flights a day | Flights a week | Operated by |
|---|---|---|---|
| LYS to NCE | 1.43 | 10 | Air France |
| NCE to LYS | 1.43 | 10 | Air France |
One carrier holds the sector, Air France, so a cancellation has no second nonstop behind it and the connections below stop being theoretical.
Between them the two directions put about 20 departures a week on LYS to NCE, 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 55 min block time on LYS to NCE. Change any of them in the tool further down and the total moves with them.
| Stage | Allowed | Elapsed |
|---|---|---|
| Collection and the run to LYS | 90 min | 1h 30m |
| At LYS before departure | 180 min | 4h 30m |
| LYS to NCE in the air, estimated | 55 min | 5h 25m |
| Formalities at NCE | 90 min | 6h 55m |
| Delivery run in Nice | 45 min | 7h 40m |
| Door to door | 460 min | 7h 40m |
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 LYS to NCE is 7h 40m.
A courier who leaves Lyon at 09:00 local is on the ground in Nice at about 09:55 local and at the door by 12:10 the same day.
Working backwards from a six in the evening handover in Nice, the last useful departure from Lyon is around 14:50 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. 59 of them join LYS to NCE.
| Connecting at | LYS to hub, flights a day | Hub to NCE, flights a day | Track, km | Estimated, gate to gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Geneva GVA | 1 | 6.14 | 397 | 2h 51m |
| Toulouse TLS | 5.29 | 0.86 | 847 | 3h 15m |
| Strasbourg SXB | 2 | 2.14 | 911 | 3h 20m |
| Bordeaux BOD | 5.29 | 2.71 | 1,110 | 3h 38m |
| Venice VCE | 1.14 | 1.14 | 1,021 | 3h 45m |
| Nantes NTE | 4 | 2.86 | 1,327 | 3h 57m |
One nonstop a day means one chance a day, so the connections below are what a consignment that arrives at LYS in the afternoon actually flies on.
59 airports connect the two ends on the scheduled network held here. The quickest of the dependable ones is Geneva GVA, where the weaker of the two legs still runs about once a day.
Through GVA the routing covers 397 km against the 285 km nonstop track and takes about 2h 51m in the air and on the ground at the hub, allowing 75 minutes to connect at an airport of that size.
That is only 1h 56m more than the nonstop, which is close enough that a connection is worth taking when the nonstop is full or badly timed.
Behind it, Toulouse TLS at 3h 15m and Strasbourg SXB at 3h 20m hold the same connection, so a booking has three hubs to try before it has to wait for the nonstop.
The two ends are only 285 km apart in a straight line. Allowing a road track a quarter longer than that and eighty kilometres an hour, a car covers it in about 4h 27m, so a courier who misses the flight drives rather than connects, and on a short deadline the road is often the plan from the start.
If nothing suitable leaves Lyon, Geneva GVA is 97 km away by great circle and carries 159 scheduled destinations of its own, which is usually a shorter road transfer than a lost day.
If nothing suitable leaves Nice, Genoa GOA is 154 km away by great circle and carries 30 scheduled destinations of its own, which is usually a shorter road transfer than a lost day.
Industry within reach of the two ends
Public manufacturing and research sites whose logistics run through LYS or NCE. Listed as industrial geography, not as customers of anyone.
- STMicroelectronics, Crolles, GrenobleWafer fabrication and research. The French Alpine cluster, an hour from Lyon. Logistics through Lyon LYS.
Plan Lyon to Nice 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 LYS to NCE 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 LYS and NCE: Frankfurt to Lyon, Lyon to Toulouse, Lyon to Dubai, Lyon to Lisbon, Lyon to Montreal, Lyon to Athens, Dusseldorf to Lyon, Lyon to Prague.