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TripKinetics
How to travel, fly, and keep moving safely while your body is still healing from surgery or injury.
Recovery on the move: flying, walking, and healing after an operation.

Flying and timing

Departure Lounge · 1 thread

When is it actually safe to fly after an operation, and how long other people were told to wait.

The first question almost everyone arrives with is the same one: how long before I can get on a plane. The honest answer depends on the operation and on the surgeon, and this section is where readers compare the waits they were actually given against the general guidance, so a number stops being abstract. People post before a first post-op flight, nervous about the timing, and afterwards to say how the wait they chose worked out.

What the timing threads keep coming back to

Read a few of these and the same shape appears. The published waiting times are a floor, not a personalised clearance, and the people who travelled most smoothly are the ones who asked their own surgeon for a number rather than assuming the general guide applied to them. Short-haul and long-haul are treated as different questions, because the clot risk of a long flight is what stretches the wait after some operations well beyond the wound-healing time.

The master table of usual waits by procedure lives in how long to wait before flying after surgery, and the reason a long flight changes the sum is set out in blood clots on flights after surgery. Neither replaces the conversation with your surgeon, which is the only place your particular case gets decided.

If you are weighing a specific date, start a thread with your operation, how many days out you would be, and whether it is short or long-haul. That is the detail that gets you a useful reply instead of a guess.