Flight number record
AA 2251
American Airlines · Dallas-Fort Worth to Baltimore
- Route
- DFW → BWI
- Departs
- 19:03
- Flights
- 358
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s AA 2251, check with American Airlines.
AA 2251 draws a D−. Roughly one flight in two arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 358 flights, with a median arrival 7 minutes late.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so AA 2251 runs 18 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 179 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
59.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 340 completed flights
Avg delay
76 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
4.75%
National rate is 1.81%
1 hour+ late
15.9%
National rate is 8.1%
These figures cover 358 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 15.9% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.
Schedule
When AA 2251 flies
AA 2251 flies DFW to BWI without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 19:03, used on 58 of 358 flights, with 19:05 (57 flights) and 18:58 (48 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.
- Departs 19:0358 flights16.2%
- Departs 19:0557 flights15.9%
- Departs 18:5848 flights13.4%
Scale runs 0% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Share of scheduled departures at each local time. Times used on fewer than one flight in ten are not listed.
A 19:03 departure sits in the 5pm–8pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 68.2%, and AA 2251 runs 9 points worse at 59.7%. By that time of day most aircraft have flown several legs already, and whatever went wrong earlier is still in the schedule.
Against the route
AA 2251 next to DFW to BWI
Every carrier on DFW to BWI combined arrived on time 69.3% of the time across 1,329 flights, so AA 2251 is 10 points behind it. American flew 938 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 69.0% on time. Across its whole network American Airlines managed 74.4%, which this flight trails by 15 points.
| Compared with | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AA 2251thin sample | 358 | 59.7% | 76 min | 4.75% | D− |
| All American Airlines on DFW–BWI | 938 | 69.0% | 66 min | 3.30% | C− |
| All carriers on DFW–BWI | 1,329 | 69.3% | 69 min | 2.93% | C |
| American Airlines, whole network | 986,297 | 74.4% | 85 min | 2.29% | C |
Across the year
AA 2251 quarter by quarter
Quarter by quarter AA 2251 held fairly steady: 62.1% in Jul–Sep 2025, 61.4% in Oct–Dec 2025, 60.0% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 55.0% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 7 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.
- Jul–Sep 202592 flights62.1%
- Oct–Dec 202589 flights61.4%
- Jan–Mar 202690 flights60.0%
- Apr–Jun 202687 flights55.0%
Scale runs 45% to 70%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
By weekday, AA 2251 did best on Thursday at 70.0% on time and worst on Sunday at 47.8%. Each day rests on about 51 flights, so a gap of 22 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.
Delay causes
Why AA 2251 runs late
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 54% of the 10,000 delay minutes carriers reported, and the remaining four split what is left. The split is by minutes rather than by flights, so a few very long delays count for as much as many short ones.
- 54%Late-arriving aircraft
- 37%Carrier
- 6%National Airspace System
- 2%Extreme weather
54% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. That is a cascade, and cascades start small and grow through the day. Across 10,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 23 to one. It is the strongest argument for booking the first departure of the morning, when the aircraft has been sitting at the gate overnight with nothing to inherit. The split is drawn from 10,359 delay minutes reported on AA 2251.
Cancellations run at 4.75%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in twenty cancelled outright. A cancelled flight is invisible in every on-time figure on this page, so the punctuality numbers above describe only the flights that actually operated.
Connections and routes
What a delay on this flight costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 15.9% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
The 1,217 miles between these two airports put this in the middle of the US network, around two and a half to three hours of block time. That is enough cruise to absorb a ten-minute late pushback and not enough to absorb thirty. It is also long enough that the aircraft usually flies three or four legs a day rather than six, which slows how fast delay compounds.
Every one of the 358 flights under AA 2251 in the data flew DFW to BWI. The number was not reused on any other city pair, which makes this a clean record of one route.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 358 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor but not enough to pin the rate down tightly, and a single bad week moves it by more than a point. Treat the grade as a rough reading.
What to do with this
Booking AA 2251
For a booking, the cancellation rate is the figure to plan around on AA 2251: 4.75% of its 358 scheduled flights did not operate. A late arrival costs a little over an hour, but a cancellation costs the day, so leave a later option open.
Related
Where to go next
- DFW to BWI, every carrier and departure
- BWI to DFW, the return direction
- American Airlines 2314 on the same route80.7%
- Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW) delay statistics
- Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall (BWI) delay statistics
- American Airlines on-time record
- Every American Airlines flight number with a record
- The most and least reliable flight numbers in the US
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
A flight number here means American Airlines’s own number as it reports to the DOT. How the figures are computed is on the methodology page.
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, July 2025 to June 2026. Last updated 15 September 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.