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Standard scheduled flight block time (SBT) setting is of great concern for Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) and airlines in China. However, the standard scheduled flight block times are set in the form of on-site meetings in practice and current literature has not provided any efficient mathematical models to calculate the flight block times fairly among the airlines. The objective of this paper is to develop and solve a mathematical model for standard SBT setting with consideration of both fairness and reliability. We use whale optimization algorithm (WOA) and an improved version of the whale optimization algorithm (IWOA) to solve the SBT setting problem. A novel nonlinear update equation of convergence factor for random iterations is used in place of the original linear one in the proposed IWOA algorithm. Experimental results show that the suggested approach is effective, and IWOA performs better than WOA in the concerned problem, whose solutions are better compared to the flight block times released by CAAC. In particular, it is interesting to find that MSE, RMSE, MAE, MAPE and Theil of the reliability in 60%–70% range are always the smallest and the average fairness of airlines is better than that of 60%–75% range. The model and solving approach presented in this article have great potential to be applied by CAAC to determine the standard SBTs strategically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]