Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
Boarding at Washington Dulles International is a deadline that doesn't move. Set your real boarding time below, fix the drive and the steps, and read off when to leave — and when to start packing.
Every row is editable: tap the boarding time or any duration and the whole plan recomputes backward. The first travel row — drive, ride, or train — is your leave-by time; the top row is when the trip actually starts.
The 40-minute drive is a typical run from Washington without traffic. Check the real drive to IAD at the hour you’ll actually leave, then put that number in.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
The Silver Line now runs all the way to a station connected to the terminal by walkway, which finally gives Dulles a predictable transit path. Driving, the Dulles Access Road is quick — it's getting to the Access Road that isn't.
The moving targets — today’s security waits, parking availability, terminal maps — live on the official IAD site. This page covers the part that doesn’t change: the backward arithmetic from boarding.
Every airport tells you when to arrive. None of them tell you when to get in the shower, and that's the number that decides whether the morning is calm or a scramble. The plan above keeps subtracting past the drive — through packing, through getting ready — until it lands on a start time you can actually act on.
That's what Ready Time does for the whole trip: set boarding as the deadline, list the real steps, and get an alert when each one is due to start. It can even pick the flight up from your calendar.
Two hours before a domestic departure is the sensible default, three for international. Shave it only on routes and hours you know firsthand. Dulles is a long way from the city, and the gates are a train ride past security — both ends of the trip are longer than they look.
After the main-terminal checkpoint, most gates are out in midfield concourses reached by the AeroTrain; it runs frequently, but it's a leg with a wait, and international departures stack the evening peak. Whatever wait you've heard about, treat the 20-minute security row in the plan above as a default to edit, not a promise: TSA PreCheck reliably shrinks it, and a checked bag reliably grows the step before it.
Mostly at the front of the chain. International check-in usually means the airline desk rather than a kiosk — documents get checked, and counters often close an hour before departure — and boarding opens earlier relative to takeoff. Choose “check-in desk” above the plan, give that row room, and take the boarding time from your boarding pass instead of guessing backward from departure. The same choice covers anyone the kiosk can't help: lap infants, unaccompanied minors, oversized bags.
Work backward from boarding, in order: time at the gate, the walk, security, bag drop, parking, then the drive — 40 minutes in the default plan, which you should replace with your route at the hour you'll actually drive it. The calculator above runs the subtraction; the leave-by moment is the first travel row — "Drive to IAD" in the default plan.
That's Ready Time's whole job. Build this plan once in the app and every step gets its own notification at its start time — start packing, leave now, you're at security's mercy from here. It can detect flights from your calendar, and the alerts carry the countdown to boarding.
Not flying? The generic leave time calculator does the same math for any appointment, and the wake-up time calculator runs it all the way back to the alarm.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
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