UA33 from Tokyo to Los Angeles, tracked live

UA33 distance and great-circle path

UA33 covers 8,753 km, or 5,439 miles. That makes it a long-haul flight, a widebody route with a full night's flying time. Of the 307 routes we track, it ranks 105 by distance.

Tokyo to Los Angeles crosses the international date line. The 8,753 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 Japan with United States.

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

Can the Boeing 737 MAX 8 comfortably fly UA33?

Yes. The route uses roughly 135% of what a Boeing 737 MAX 8 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 Boeing 737 MAX 8.

What to know about UA33

• Time change: you land 16 hours behind the time you left. That is enough to cause jet lag. Here is how pilots handle it.
• Crosses the date line: the calendar date changes while you are in the air.

What flying NRT to LAX takes

It is a long-haul sector, a widebody route with a full night's flying time. United Airlines needs a widebody twinjet: the sector needs long-range tanks and a cabin crew rest provision, which rules out most single-aisle types. 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 right (south-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 UAL33 through adsbdb, not a schedule copied from elsewhere. We have logged it airborne on 13 days between 2026-09-20 and 2026-10-03. 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 Tokyo and Los Angeles, split between Singapore Airlines and United Airlines. Among them, it is the only one flown with a Boeing 737 MAX 8.

Measured against UA33:

• SQ12 (Singapore Airlines) runs the same pairing, on a Boeing 777-300ER.

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 7 observations of UA33 across 7 UTC dates in this window, most recently 2026-10-03. Those records contain 6 distinct transponder addresses. The most frequently resolved route was NRT-LAX (7 records).

The median recorded visibility was 737 minutes. That is time inside receiver coverage, not airborne duration or an on-time-performance measurement.