UA51 EWR → MAD

UA51 distance and great-circle path

UA51 covers 5,789 km, or 3,597 miles. That makes it a long-haul flight, a widebody route with a full night's flying time. Of the 259 routes we track, it ranks 147 by distance.

Newark to Madrid is 5,789 km (3,597 miles) on an initial heading of 65°, which is broadly north-east. Watches move 6 hours forward between the two gates. It links United States with Spain.

Our guide explains how the EWR–MAD route appears on a tracker map.

What to know about UA51

• Time change: you land 6 hours ahead of the time you left. That is enough to cause jet lag. Here is how pilots handle it.

What flying EWR to MAD 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 UAL51 through adsbdb, not a schedule copied from elsewhere. We have logged it airborne on 2 days between 2026-09-20 and 2026-09-21. 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.

Our database contains 2 observations of UA51 across 2 UTC dates in this window, most recently 2026-09-21. Those records contain 2 distinct transponder addresses.

The median recorded visibility was 419 minutes. That is time inside receiver coverage, not airborne duration or an on-time-performance measurement.