Dr Helena Boyd, MB ChB, MRCP, FRCP

My working life is the part of medicine that starts once the operation is over: how a body gets from the recovery ward back to a full life, and how quickly that can safely happen. As a consultant in rehabilitation medicine I spend my days on exactly the questions this site is built around, when it is reasonable to be up and moving, what a healing body can and cannot yet take, and where the sensible caution ends and needless fear begins.

Travel sits right in the middle of that. A flight is a physiological event, lower cabin oxygen, hours of stillness, pressure changes, landing on someone who is already healing, and patients are rarely told how it interacts with a recent operation until they are worrying about it at the gate. So I was glad to take this on. On each article I check that the timings, the clot-risk figures, and the fitness-to-fly advice match current guidance from bodies such as the CAA, the NHS and the WHO, and I push back wherever a general rule is being stretched past what the evidence supports.

One line stays on every page and I mean it plainly: the numbers here are a starting point, not a clearance. Only the surgeon who performed your operation knows your particular case, and the decision about when you personally are fit to travel is a conversation to have with them, not something a website can sign off.