The sector is held by Southwest Airlines.
Airport pair · hand carry reference
MSY New Orleans to SAN San Diego
Louis Armstrong, the United States, to San Diego International, the United States. Computed from the scheduled network held on 2026-09-07.
- Nonstop
- About once a day
- Great circle
- 2,568 km
- Block, estimated
- 3h 47m
- Door to door
- 10h 32m
What MSY to SAN looks like
The MSY to SAN sector, the carriers on it and the flying time, before anything is promised to anybody.
New Orleans MSY to San Diego SAN is a medium haul sector of 2,568 km by great circle, flown nonstop about once a day.
At the cruise speed this site models for 2,568 km, 830 km an hour, and thirty minutes of taxi at the two ends, the flight blocks at about 3h 47m.
New Orleans MSY is a mid sized airport in the network held here, 77 scheduled destinations and 139.8 departures a day. San Diego SAN has 123 destinations and 409.4 departures a day.
San Diego carries about 2.9 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.
San Diego is 2 hours behind of New Orleans all year.
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 SAN from the scheduled route statistics, both directions, with the operating carriers named.
| Direction | Flights a day | Flights a week | Operated by |
|---|---|---|---|
| MSY to SAN | 1 | 7 | Southwest Airlines |
| SAN to MSY | 1 | 7 | Southwest Airlines |
One carrier holds the sector, Southwest Airlines, so a cancellation has no second nonstop behind it and the connections below stop being theoretical.
Between them the two directions put about 14 departures a week on MSY to SAN, 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 47m block time on MSY to SAN. 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 SAN in the air, estimated | 227 min | 8h 17m |
| Formalities at SAN | 90 min | 9h 47m |
| Delivery run in San Diego | 45 min | 10h 32m |
| Door to door | 632 min | 10h 32m |
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 SAN is 10h 32m.
A courier who leaves New Orleans at 09:00 local is on the ground in San Diego at about 10:47 local and at the door by 13:02 the same day.
Working backwards from a six in the evening handover in San Diego, the last useful departure from New Orleans is around 13:58 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 MSY to SAN.
| Connecting at | MSY to hub, flights a day | Hub to SAN, flights a day | Track, km | Estimated, gate to gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Houston IAH | 9 | 4.14 | 2,582 | 5h 38m |
| Phoenix PHX | 1.29 | 21 | 2,578 | 5h 38m |
| Houston HOU | 7 | 3.43 | 2,594 | 5h 40m |
| Dallas DAL | 6.29 | 5.14 | 2,599 | 5h 42m |
| Dallas DFW | 9.29 | 11.71 | 2,599 | 5h 58m |
| Kansas City MCI | 0.57 | 1.14 | 3,254 | 6h 09m |
One nonstop a day means one chance a day, so the connections below are what a consignment that arrives at MSY in the afternoon actually flies on.
36 airports connect the two ends on the scheduled network held here. The quickest of the dependable ones is Houston IAH, where the weaker of the two legs still runs 4.1 times a day.
Through IAH the routing covers 2,582 km against the 2,568 km nonstop track and takes about 5h 38m 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 51m more than the nonstop, which is close enough that a connection is worth taking when the nonstop is full or badly timed.
Behind it, Phoenix PHX at 5h 38m and Houston HOU at 5h 40m hold the same connection, so a booking has three hubs to try before it has to wait for the nonstop.
If nothing suitable leaves San Diego, Tijuana TIJ is 30 km away by great circle and carries 45 scheduled destinations of its own, which is usually a shorter road transfer than a lost day.
Plan New Orleans to San Diego 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 SAN 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 SAN airport entry
- Hand carry into the United States
- The written lane, San Diego to Tijuana
- The route calculator
More pairs through MSY and SAN: New Orleans to Houston, Charlotte to New Orleans, Washington DC to New Orleans, Dallas to New Orleans, Nashville to New Orleans, New Orleans to Houston, San Diego to San Francisco, San Diego to Seattle.