How long is the flight from Arizona to Colorado?

Driving non-stop from Arizona to Colorado

How far is Colorado from Arizona? Here's the quick answer if you have friends taking shifts as driver so that you can make the entire trip by car without stopping.

Nonstop drive: 676 miles or 1088 km

Driving time: 12 hours, 30 minutes

This is a really long drive, so it's not very realistic to drive nonstop. To get a better idea of how long this road trip would actually take, scroll down to calculate how many hours it would be if you drive with stops.

Flying non-stop from Arizona to Colorado

Now let's assume you have a private jet and you can fly in the fastest possible straight line between Arizona (AZ) and Colorado (CO). Because of the curvature of the Earth, the shortest distance is actually the "great circle" distance, or "as the crow flies" which is calculated using an iterative Vincenty formula.

Flight distance: 497 miles or 800 km

Flight time: 1 hour, 10 minutes

The straight line flight distance is 179 miles less than driving on roads, which means the driving distance is roughly 1.4x of the flight distance.

Your plane flies much faster than a car, so the flight time is about 1/9th of the time it would take to drive.

This is a relatively short flight in a private plane, but you might be planning to book a commercial flight. In that case, your travel time would really need to include how many minutes to get to your local airport, wait for security, board and taxi on the runway, land at the other airport, and get to your destination. Scroll down to see a more realistic calculation that takes into account all these factors to get a more accurate estimate of your actual flight time.

Arizona to Colorado road trip

Let's say you're actually planning a road trip to Colorado, and you want to stop along the way to rest. If it's a real road trip, you might want to check out interesting stops along the way, eat at great restaurants, and maybe even find a hotel to stay overnight. That's what Trippy is perfect for, helping you figure out travel plans in detail.

Based on the length of this trip, we think you could spread out this fun road trip over more than one day.

Road trip: 2 days of driving

With the full itinerary planned out, we can estimate your total travel time for this trip.

Travel time: 14 hours on the road with 1 overnight

Itinerary

Start at Arizona.

To see all the details on this itinerary, including recommended restaurants, hotels, and things to do along the way, check out the full road trip planner:

Arizona to Colorado airports and flights

In the quick calculation above, we assumed you had a private plane and just wanted to know the time in the air from city to city. But for most of us, we're going to be flying on a commercial airline (whether it's first class or coach). So that means we really need to account for all the extra travel time getting to the airport, waiting for our flight, and making it to the destination.

To give you a better estimate of real-life travel, we've put together a flight itinerary with actual airports. Eventually you'll be able to customize this plan, choosing your own airports and flights. But for now, here's an example we've selected to give you an idea of how traveling might work between airports.

Departure airport: Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX)

Arrival airport: Colorado Springs Airport (COS)

With the airports selected, we can estimate the travel time to and from the airport, based on how far the airport is from downtown.

Getting to the airport: 128 minutes

Getting to your destination: 115 minutes

Now finally, let's look at an actual flight from PHX to COS on American Airlines and figure out how long it would take to fly including take-off and landing, and time to taxi on the runway.

Commercial flight time: 1 hour, 27 minutes

So now we can finally get an idea of the total travel time from Arizona to Colorado including time spent getting to/from the airports, an estimated wait time of 2 hours at the airport for TSA security lines and waiting at the gate, and the actual flight itself.

Total travel time: 8 hours

To see the details on this flight plan, including recommended airports, airline, and route, check out the flight planner:

Plan a trip to Colorado

Trippy has a ton of information that can help you plan your trip to Colorado (CO). Start by reading the Trippy page on where to stay in Colorado. Check out some of the questions people have asked about Colorado like Hiking in Breckenridge & Steamboat Springs. Click the button below to explore Colorado in detail.

How far is it the other way?

The distance is the same either way if you're flying a straight line (or driving the same roads back and forth). But for a real trip, there can be plenty of differences so go ahead and check the reverse directions to get the distance from Colorado to Arizona, or go to the main page to calculate the distance between cities.

If you happen to know Arizona, don't forget to help other travelers and answer some questions about Arizona!

How many hours is flight from Colorado to Arizona?

How long does it take to fly to Arizona from Denver?

How far is the flight from Phoenix to Denver?

How far is Denver from Arizona by plane?