Flight Time & Fuel Cost Calculator

This calculator turns a distance, an expected true airspeed, and a wind component into flight time, fuel burned, and dollars spent. Ground speed is simply true airspeed minus a headwind component (or plus a tailwind, entered as a negative headwind value), flight time is distance divided by that ground speed, and fuel used is flight time multiplied by your entered burn rate — straightforward dead-reckoning arithmetic rather than a full performance model, so it doesn't account for climb/descent fuel penalties or reserve requirements. Fuel weight is derived using 6.0 lb/gal for avgas or 6.7 lb/gal for Jet-A, letting you sanity-check the load against a weight-and-balance calculation.

For the round trip, the calculator reverses the wind component on the return leg (a headwind out becomes a tailwind back, and vice versa) and sums both legs' time, fuel, and cost — a useful reminder that a round trip with a steady wind is never simply double the one-way numbers, since ground speed doesn't average out linearly with time. Cost per nautical mile and cost per hour are also broken out so you can compare trips or aircraft on a common basis. Keep in mind this uses a single constant wind component for the whole route; a real flight's wind typically varies by leg and altitude, so cross-check these numbers against actual forecast winds aloft before you file — this is a trip-planning tool, not a dispatch-grade fuel release calculation.