The sector is held by Copa Airlines.
Airport pair · hand carry reference
PTY Panama City to MDE Medellin
Tocumen International, Panama, to Jose Maria Cordova, Colombia. Computed from the scheduled network held on 2026-09-07.
- Nonstop
- 9.4 times a day
- Great circle
- 543 km
- Block, estimated
- 1h 18m
- Door to door
- 8h 03m
What PTY to MDE looks like
The PTY to MDE sector, the carriers on it and the flying time, before anything is promised to anybody.
Panama City PTY to Medellin MDE is a short sector of 543 km by great circle, flown nonstop 9.4 times a day.
At the cruise speed this site models for 543 km, 720 km an hour, and thirty minutes of taxi at the two ends, the flight blocks at about 1h 18m.
Panama City PTY is a large airport in the network held here, 89 scheduled destinations and 246.3 departures a day. Medellin MDE has 39 destinations and 158.7 departures a day.
Panama City and Medellin 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 PTY to MDE from the scheduled route statistics, both directions, with the operating carriers named.
| Direction | Flights a day | Flights a week | Operated by |
|---|---|---|---|
| PTY to MDE | 9.43 | 66 | Copa Airlines |
| MDE to PTY | 9.14 | 64 | Copa Airlines |
One carrier holds the sector, Copa Airlines, so a cancellation has no second nonstop behind it and the connections below stop being theoretical.
At 9.4 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 130 departures a week on PTY to MDE, 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 18m block time on PTY to MDE. Change any of them in the tool further down and the total moves with them.
| Stage | Allowed | Elapsed |
|---|---|---|
| Collection and the run to PTY | 90 min | 1h 30m |
| At PTY before departure | 180 min | 4h 30m |
| PTY to MDE in the air, estimated | 78 min | 5h 48m |
| Formalities at MDE | 90 min | 7h 18m |
| Delivery run in Medellin | 45 min | 8h 03m |
| Door to door | 483 min | 8h 03m |
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 PTY to MDE is 8h 03m.
A courier who leaves Panama City at 09:00 local is on the ground in Medellin at about 10:18 local and at the door by 12:33 the same day.
Working backwards from a six in the evening handover in Medellin, the last useful departure from Panama City is around 14:27 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. 24 of them join PTY to MDE.
| Connecting at | PTY to hub, flights a day | Hub to MDE, flights a day | Track, km | Estimated, gate to gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cartagena CTG | 5.43 | 17.86 | 927 | 3h 22m |
| Cali CLO | 6 | 9 | 1,008 | 3h 29m |
| Bogota BOG | 10.73 | 54.29 | 970 | 3h 41m |
| San Jose SJO | 12 | 1.57 | 1,596 | 4h 09m |
| Quito UIO | 6.86 | 0.86 | 1,801 | 4h 27m |
| Aruba AUA | 3.29 | 0.57 | 2,013 | 4h 35m |
With 9.4 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.
24 airports connect the two ends on the scheduled network held here. The quickest of the dependable ones is Cartagena CTG, where the weaker of the two legs still runs 5.4 times a day.
Through CTG the routing covers 927 km against the 543 km nonstop track and takes about 3h 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 2h 04m more than the nonstop, which is close enough that a connection is worth taking when the nonstop is full or badly timed.
Behind it, Cali CLO at 3h 29m and Bogota BOG at 3h 41m hold the same connection, so a booking has three hubs to try before it has to wait for the nonstop.
If nothing suitable leaves Medellin, Bogota BOG is 215 km away by great circle and carries 102 scheduled destinations of its own, which is usually a shorter road transfer than a lost day.
Plan Panama City to Medellin 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 PTY to MDE 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 PTY airport entry
- The MDE airport entry
- Hand carry into Panama
- Hand carry into Colombia
- The route calculator
More pairs through PTY and MDE: Bogota to Medellin, Mexico City to Medellin, Buenos Aires to Medellin, Medellin to Santiago, Medellin to Mexico City, Sao Paulo to Panama City, Bogota to Panama City, Miami to Panama City.