DL42 from Sydney to Los Angeles, tracked live

DL42 distance and great-circle path

DL42 covers 12,061 km, or 7,494 miles. That makes it an ultra-long-haul flight, near the limit of what most twinjets can fly non-stop. Of the 367 routes we track, it ranks 25 by distance.

Sydney to Los Angeles crosses the international date line. The 12,061 km track runs north-east, and the calendar date at the gate in Los Angeles will not be the one the cabin expects. It links Australia with United States.

Our guide explains how the SYD-LAX route appears on a tracker map.

Can the Airbus A330-900neo comfortably fly DL42?

Yes. The route uses roughly 90% of what an Airbus A330-900neo can fly. On a windy day the airline may carry less cargo to save fuel. Flights this close to the limit are the ones that sometimes make a fuel stop. The full numbers are on our aircraft page for the Airbus A330-900neo.

What to know about DL42

• Time change: you land 18 hours behind the time you left. That is enough to cause jet lag. Here is how pilots handle it.
• Crosses the equator: you swap seasons between takeoff and landing.
• Crosses the date line: the calendar date changes while you are in the air.

What flying SYD to LAX takes

It is an ultra-long-haul sector, near the limit of what most twinjets can fly non-stop. Delta Air Lines needs a long-range widebody such as an A350, 787 or 777: few types can fly this far with a commercial payload, and headwinds can force a technical stop on the worst days. Eastbound, the jet stream is usually a tailwind, so the return leg against it tends to be the longer of the two. In daylight the sun sits on the left (north-facing) side of the cabin for most of the crossing.

How we verified this

The origin and destination on this page are the ones we verified for callsign DAL42 through adsbdb, not a schedule copied from elsewhere. We have logged it airborne on 30 days between 2026-09-20 and 2026-10-19. Timings are observations, not an official operational status: always confirm with the airline before travelling.

This page was published from our own tracking record rather than a third-party schedule feed, so it grows as we see the flight again. The seven-day log below is the raw version of the same evidence.

We track 2 scheduled services between Sydney and Los Angeles, split between Delta Air Lines and Qantas. Among them, it is the only one flown with an Airbus A330-900neo.

Measured against DL42:

• QF11 (Qantas) runs the same pairing, on an Airbus A380-800.

Block time is gate to gate, so it counts taxi at both ends. That is why two flights covering identical distance rarely share a scheduled duration.

Our database contains 8 observations of DL42 across 8 UTC dates in this window, most recently 2026-10-19. Those records contain 4 distinct transponder addresses. The most frequently resolved route was SYD-LAX (8 records).

The median recorded visibility was 157 minutes. That is time inside receiver coverage, not airborne duration or an on-time-performance measurement.