The sector is held by Ethiopian Airlines.
Airport pair · hand carry reference
ZNZ Zanzibar to ADD Addis Ababa
Abeid Amani Karume, Tanzania, to Bole International, Ethiopia. Computed from the scheduled network held on 2026-09-07.
- Nonstop
- 3 times a day
- Great circle
- 1,691 km
- Block, estimated
- 2h 40m
- Door to door
- 9h 25m
What ZNZ to ADD looks like
The ZNZ to ADD sector, the carriers on it and the flying time, before anything is promised to anybody.
Zanzibar ZNZ to Addis Ababa ADD is a medium haul sector of 1,691 km by great circle, flown nonstop 3 times a day.
At the cruise speed this site models for 1,691 km, 830 km an hour, and thirty minutes of taxi at the two ends, the flight blocks at about 2h 40m.
Zanzibar ZNZ is a smaller airport in the network held here, 27 scheduled destinations and 91.7 departures a day. Addis Ababa ADD has 114 destinations and 223.1 departures a day.
Zanzibar and Addis Ababa keep the same clock all year, so the arrival time is the departure time plus the block and nothing else.
The pair sits inside Africa, a corridor the written lanes do not cover, which is the reason a computed page for it exists at all.
Who flies the sector, and how often
Average daily frequencies on ZNZ to ADD from the scheduled route statistics, both directions, with the operating carriers named.
| Direction | Flights a day | Flights a week | Operated by |
|---|---|---|---|
| ZNZ to ADD | 3 | 21 | Ethiopian Airlines |
| ADD to ZNZ | 2.29 | 16 | Ethiopian Airlines |
One carrier holds the sector, Ethiopian Airlines, so a cancellation has no second nonstop behind it and the connections below stop being theoretical.
At 3 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 37 departures a week on ZNZ to ADD, 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 2h 40m block time on ZNZ to ADD. Change any of them in the tool further down and the total moves with them.
| Stage | Allowed | Elapsed |
|---|---|---|
| Collection and the run to ZNZ | 90 min | 1h 30m |
| At ZNZ before departure | 180 min | 4h 30m |
| ZNZ to ADD in the air, estimated | 160 min | 7h 10m |
| Formalities at ADD | 90 min | 8h 40m |
| Delivery run in Addis Ababa | 45 min | 9h 25m |
| Door to door | 565 min | 9h 25m |
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 ZNZ to ADD is 9h 25m.
A courier who leaves Zanzibar at 09:00 local is on the ground in Addis Ababa at about 11:40 local and at the door by 13:55 the same day.
Working backwards from a six in the evening handover in Addis Ababa, the last useful departure from Zanzibar is around 13:05 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. 16 of them join ZNZ to ADD.
| Connecting at | ZNZ to hub, flights a day | Hub to ADD, flights a day | Track, km | Estimated, gate to gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mombasa MBA | 5.86 | 2.29 | 1,697 | 4h 13m |
| Dar es Salaam DAR | 34.57 | 3.43 | 1,837 | 4h 21m |
| Nairobi NBO | 7.46 | 3.29 | 1,766 | 4h 22m |
| Kilimanjaro JRO | 1.71 | 2.29 | 1,784 | 4h 22m |
| Kigali KGL | 0.86 | 3.43 | 2,663 | 5h 24m |
| Abu Dhabi AUH | 0.59 | 2.29 | 6,200 | 9h 53m |
With 3 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.
16 airports connect the two ends on the scheduled network held here. The quickest of the dependable ones is Mombasa MBA, where the weaker of the two legs still runs about twice a day.
Through MBA the routing covers 1,697 km against the 1,691 km nonstop track and takes about 4h 13m 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 33m more than the nonstop, which is close enough that a connection is worth taking when the nonstop is full or badly timed.
Behind it, Dar es Salaam DAR at 4h 21m and Nairobi NBO at 4h 22m hold the same connection, so a booking has three hubs to try before it has to wait for the nonstop.
If nothing suitable leaves Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam DAR is 73 km away by great circle and carries 37 scheduled destinations of its own, which is usually a shorter road transfer than a lost day.
Plan Zanzibar to Addis Ababa 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 ZNZ to ADD 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 ZNZ airport entry
- The ADD airport entry
- Hand carry into Tanzania
- Hand carry into Ethiopia
- The written lane, Dubai to Addis Ababa
- The route calculator
More pairs through ZNZ and ADD: Addis Ababa to Abu Dhabi, Addis Ababa to Jeddah, Addis Ababa to Milan, Addis Ababa to Sharjah, Addis Ababa to Tel Aviv, Addis Ababa to Riyadh, Beirut to Addis Ababa, Sao Paulo to Addis Ababa.