1,741 km and around 2 h 37 aloft, in a light or midsize cabin, finishing at the London field that suits the City, Kent and Surrey. Nothing resembling a price appears below and the reason is plain enough: which aeroplane flies this is settled by what the strip at the Rock will take on your date with your load aboard, and until that has been worked out any figure would be describing a different aircraft. Send the date and the party; something written follows inside thirty minutes and +357 95 119759 answers at every hour.
Two and a half hours due north, off a single strip at the mouth of the Mediterranean and down at the south-eastern edge of London. The flying part is unremarkable. The leaving part deserves a conversation, and we would rather have it before you commit than on the morning itself.
REQUEST A QUOTEEverything interesting here happens inside the first two minutes. Gibraltar holds one runway, 09/27, and 1,776 m of it; getting airborne means lifting your party, your baggage and fuel for 1,741 km off that length, on the day, into whatever wind is blowing on the day. At the far end Biggin Hill demands nothing of anybody – it is simply the London field with the shortest drive attached for a great many people. So this page concerns the departure rather than the arrival, which inverts most of what we publish.
Coordinates and codes: OurAirports open dataset. The duration comes from a simple model fitted to block times this website publishes itself – it is not a measured time and we say so rather than quote it as one. Runway dimensions, elevation and the customs status of the field are figures already published on our own Biggin Hill to Gibraltar page.
One departure that cannot be exchanged for anything, and one arrival chosen purely by road. Nothing on the Rock is an alternative to Gibraltar – no other field exists. In London the choice is genuine, but it is a choice about traffic rather than about aviation.
| Airport | Codes | Role | What to know |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gibraltar | GIB / LXGB | departure | One runway, 09/27, 1,776 m of grooved asphalt at 3.7 m above sea level. By the standards of most airports our routes touch that is short, and departing, the length has to carry your passengers, your luggage and fuel for 1,741 km all at once. It is a constraint rather than a problem, and it belongs in the conversation before anybody quotes a number. Customs sits on the field, so the outbound formalities happen beside the aircraft. |
| London Biggin Hill | BQH / EGKB | arrival | Every distance and duration here is measured to it. It sits at London’s south-eastern edge, which makes it the short drive for anybody finishing in the City, in Kent or in Surrey, and that is the whole of its case. Where the evening ends elsewhere in London, say so and a different field gets named rather than landing you on the wrong side of the M25. |
| London Luton | LTN / EGGW | arrival alternative | The usual alternate, and the answer when the aeroplane suited to the Gibraltar strip happens to live there. North of London, which reverses the road argument entirely. |
| Farnborough | FAB / EGLF | arrival alternative | The other customary alternate, south-west of London. Same reasoning: where the right aircraft is based, it is frequently cheaper to land where it wants to go home than to shift it across the country afterwards. |
These are the types we most often put on a leg of this length. The final answer comes out of runway performance at Gibraltar against your date and your load, which is why we confirm it instead of publishing it. Something larger may still work, and may not – we check rather than guess, and where the answer is no we say so before you have committed to anything.
A light cabin, and the ordinary starting point for four to six people with normal luggage. Of the three it asks least of 1,776 m, which on a warm afternoon at the Rock is the quality that counts.
See the Phenom 300 ›A midsize cabin with standing room down most of its length, and a short-field record that makes it a natural fit here. The type to name when the party wants to stand up for two and a half hours without surrendering the field.
See the Citation XLS+ ›Super-midsize, for a larger party or more baggage. Subject to precisely the same runway check as everything else, and that check happens before it is offered to you rather than afterwards.
See the Challenger 350 ›The full fleet, with cabin dimensions and range for every type, is on the aircraft pages. We would sooner lose the enquiry than put you aboard an aeroplane obliged to leave fuel, bags or passengers behind to make the departure work.
No price is published for this route in either heading, and we would rather explain the reason than print a number that turns out to describe a different aircraft on a different day.
What a charter costs is decided by which aeroplane flies it, where that aeroplane began its day, whether it waits for you or goes home empty, and the charges at both fields. Two quotations for the same leg on the same date can differ twofold for reasons unconnected with anybody’s generosity. Here the strip introduces one further variable ahead of all of those, because it narrows the list of candidate aircraft before the commercial questions are even put.
That narrowing bites harder leaving than arriving. An aeroplane landing at Gibraltar has burnt most of its fuel reaching it; the same aeroplane setting off for London has to lift that fuel off 1,776 m alongside your party and a fortnight of luggage. It is why we ask what you are carrying before we ask anything else, and why a quotation arriving without that question having been put deserves reading sceptically.
Send the date and the number of passengers and real options with real numbers follow, normally inside thirty minutes. The operations desk is on duty round the clock on +357 95 119759.
GET A FIRM PRICENo seasonal classification is published for this pairing, and rather than manufacture one we will give you the single calendar fact that genuinely alters the flight: the wind.
Gibraltar is exposed to strong cross winds around the Rock itself and across the Bay of Gibraltar, and winter is the difficult season for them. Among pilots it is the most quoted thing about the airport, and quoted for good reason. For a passenger leaving the Rock it means one thing: on a bad wind day the departure may not happen at the hour written on the itinerary, and an itinerary built around a tight connection in London is built on optimism. We name the alternate for your flight when the quotation goes out, so that you know where the aircraft goes should the weather take a different view.
What follows is a booking habit rather than a season. Through the winter months, hand us the London hour that actually matters – the dinner, the meeting, the onward flight – instead of the departure hour you would prefer, and the morning gets built backwards from it with room left in the middle. In the settled months the same journey is an ordinary short-notice charter. Handling hours and airport charges at both ends shift season by season and we confirm them against your real dates rather than against a rule of thumb printed on a web page.
One piece of Gibraltar folklore deserves correcting before you travel, because brokers repeat it from memory for years after it ceased to be true.
The celebrated photograph shows Winston Churchill Avenue, the main road to the Spanish border, crossing the runway, with traffic halted every time an aircraft moved. That photograph records an arrangement that has ended. Since 31 March 2023 a new dual carriageway, the Kingsway, carries road traffic beneath the eastern end of the runway through a tunnel of about 350 m, and everyday traffic no longer crosses the strip at all. If somebody has told you to allow extra time at the border because aircraft movements will stop the cars, that was once true and is not the present arrangement.
It matters more going out than coming in. A departure is the movement you are trying to hit a particular minute with, and the old arrangement was exactly what used to put a queue of cars between you and it.
Biggin Hill is a London address rather than a terminus, and a further leg settled in the same conversation generally costs less than the identical leg bought alone a week later.
South-east London to the Alps without shifting airports in between. The continuation requested most often when the London stop is a working week rather than the end of the journey.
Biggin Hill to Geneva ›Back to the Mediterranean through a different door, and the leg that turns a London week into a Riviera one without a drive across the city first.
Biggin Hill to Nice ›Northern Italy off the same apron. Worth naming early where the week after London is a winter one.
Biggin Hill to Turin ›Tell us your dates and how many of you there are. Your dedicated flight advisor will come back with aircraft options and a firm price.
All published routes are listed on the route index. Also useful: the fleet, current empty legs, jet sharing.