The sector is held by Delta Air Lines, Mesa Airlines and United Airlines.
Airport pair · hand carry reference
MSY New Orleans to IAH Houston
Louis Armstrong, the United States, to George Bush Intercontinental, the United States. Computed from the scheduled network held on 2026-09-07.
- Nonstop
- 9 times a day
- Great circle
- 489 km
- Block, estimated
- 1h 13m
- Door to door
- 7h 58m
What MSY to IAH looks like
The MSY to IAH sector, the carriers on it and the flying time, before anything is promised to anybody.
New Orleans MSY to Houston IAH is a short sector of 489 km by great circle, flown nonstop 9 times a day.
At the cruise speed this site models for 489 km, 720 km an hour, and thirty minutes of taxi at the two ends, the flight blocks at about 1h 13m.
New Orleans MSY is a mid sized airport in the network held here, 77 scheduled destinations and 139.8 departures a day. Houston IAH has 197 destinations and 641 departures a day.
Houston carries about 4.6 times the departures of New Orleans, so a courier who has to be rebooked has far more to work with at one end of this pair than at the other.
New Orleans and Houston keep the same clock all year, so the arrival time is the departure time plus the block and nothing else.
The pair sits inside the Americas, a corridor where the site already publishes 13 written lanes that go into customs and ground detail this page does not.
Who flies the sector, and how often
Average daily frequencies on MSY to IAH from the scheduled route statistics, both directions, with the operating carriers named.
| Direction | Flights a day | Flights a week | Operated by |
|---|---|---|---|
| MSY to IAH | 9 | 63 | Delta Air Lines, Mesa Airlines, United Airlines |
| IAH to MSY | 8.57 | 60 | United Airlines |
3 carriers are recorded on the sector, so a missed departure is normally a rebooking rather than a lost day.
At 9 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 123 departures a week on MSY to IAH, 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 1h 13m block time on MSY to IAH. Change any of them in the tool further down and the total moves with them.
| Stage | Allowed | Elapsed |
|---|---|---|
| Collection and the run to MSY | 90 min | 1h 30m |
| At MSY before departure | 180 min | 4h 30m |
| MSY to IAH in the air, estimated | 73 min | 5h 43m |
| Formalities at IAH | 90 min | 7h 13m |
| Delivery run in Houston | 45 min | 7h 58m |
| Door to door | 478 min | 7h 58m |
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 MSY to IAH is 7h 58m.
A courier who leaves New Orleans at 09:00 local is on the ground in Houston at about 10:13 local and at the door by 12:28 the same day.
Working backwards from a six in the evening handover in Houston, the last useful departure from New Orleans is around 14:32 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 MSY to IAH.
| Connecting at | MSY to hub, flights a day | Hub to IAH, flights a day | Track, km | Estimated, gate to gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Memphis MEM | 1 | 5.14 | 1,316 | 3h 57m |
| Dallas DFW | 9.29 | 19.57 | 1,081 | 4h 06m |
| Kansas City MCI | 0.57 | 3.86 | 2,149 | 4h 44m |
| St Louis STL | 2 | 3.86 | 2,050 | 4h 52m |
| Atlanta ATL | 10.71 | 15 | 1,792 | 4h 55m |
| Nashville BNA | 4.86 | 5 | 1,816 | 4h 58m |
With 9 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 Memphis MEM, where the weaker of the two legs still runs about once a day.
Through MEM the routing covers 1,316 km against the 489 km nonstop track and takes about 3h 57m in the air and on the ground at the hub, allowing 60 minutes to connect at an airport of that size.
That is 2h 44m more than the nonstop, which is the price of a missed departure on this pair.
Behind it, Dallas DFW at 4h 06m and Kansas City MCI at 4h 44m hold the same connection, so a booking has three hubs to try before it has to wait for the nonstop.
If nothing suitable leaves Houston, Houston HOU is 38 km away by great circle and carries 145 scheduled destinations of its own, which is usually a shorter road transfer than a lost day.
Plan New Orleans to Houston 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 MSY to IAH 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 MSY airport entry
- The IAH airport entry
- Hand carry into the United States
- The written lane, Doha to Houston
- The written lane, Dubai to Houston
- The written lane, Houston to Aberdeen
- The route calculator
More pairs through MSY and IAH: Atlanta to Houston, San Francisco to Houston, Chicago to Houston, Houston to Boston, Seattle to Houston, Frankfurt to Houston, Detroit to Houston, Amsterdam to Houston.