Flight number record
F9 689
Frontier Airlines · Washington to Denver
- Route
- DCA → DEN
- Departs
- 18:00
- Flights
- 306
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s F9 689, check with Frontier Airlines.
F9 689 draws a C. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is close to two hours behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 306 flights, with a median arrival 1 minute early.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so F9 689 runs 11 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 106 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
66.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 300 completed flights
Avg delay
110 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.63%
National rate is 1.89%
1 hour+ late
14.7%
National rate is 8.3%
These figures cover 306 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 14.7% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Schedule
When F9 689 flies
F9 689 is scheduled to leave Washington (DCA) at 18:00 local time and reach Denver (DEN) at 20:16. That slot held for 280 of the 306 scheduled departures in the data, so the figures below describe one steady operation rather than a number that moved around the clock.
- Departs 18:00280 flights91.5%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of scheduled departures at each local time. Times used on fewer than one flight in ten are not listed.
A 18:00 departure sits in the 5pm–8pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 68.0%, and F9 689 runs level with that at 66.7%. By that time of day most aircraft have flown several legs already, and whatever went wrong earlier is still in the schedule.
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Against the route
F9 689 next to DCA to DEN
Every carrier on DCA to DEN combined arrived on time 78.2% of the time across 1,347 flights, so F9 689 is 12 points behind it. Frontier flew 983 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 78.1% on time. Across its whole network Frontier Airlines managed 72.7%, which this flight trails by 6 points.
| Compared with | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| F9 689thin sample | 306 | 66.7% | 110 min | 1.63% | C |
| All Frontier Airlines on DCA–DEN | 983 | 78.1% | 81 min | 1.02% | B |
| All carriers on DCA–DEN | 1,347 | 78.2% | 82 min | 0.89% | B+ |
| Frontier Airlines, whole network | 213,022 | 72.7% | 84 min | 2.05% | C |
Across the year
F9 689 quarter by quarter
F9 689 did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Oct–Dec 2025 at 73.4% on time and its weakest Jul–Sep 2026 at 52.0%, a swing of 21 points on roughly 77 flights a quarter. The twelve-month rate averages over that, so if you are flying in a weak quarter the quarter's own figure is the better guide.
- Jul–Sep 202526 flights—
- Oct–Dec 202579 flights73.4%
- Jan–Mar 202673 flights67.1%
- Apr–Jun 202676 flights70.7%
- Jul–Sep 202652 flights52.0%
Scale runs 45% to 80%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
By weekday, F9 689 did best on Saturday at 83.7% on time and worst on Tuesday at 54.3%. Each day rests on about 44 flights, so a gap of 29 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.
Arrival by arrival
How late F9 689 runs when it is late
F9 689 often beats the schedule: 88 of 300 completed flights, 29%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 100 late arrivals split 31 under half an hour, 25 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 44 an hour or more.
- 15+ min early88 flights29.3%
- Within 15 min112 flights37.3%
- 15–29 min late31 flights10.3%
- 30–59 min late25 flights8.3%
- 1–2 hours late19 flights6.3%
- 2+ hours late25 flights8.3%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 300 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
13 of 81 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 16% of them. In the other direction, 32 flights left on time yet arrived 15 minutes late or more, so that delay built up after pushback: in the air, in a holding pattern or on the ground at DEN.
The worst days
Worst days for F9 689
The latest arrival of the period was on 23 February 2026, 17 hours 59 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. The five worst days are spread across February, August, June and January, with no single month standing out.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 23 February 2026 | 17 hours 59 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 27 August 2026 | 16 hours 8 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 12 June 2026 | 16 hours 4 minutes | Extreme weather |
| 21 June 2026 | 15 hours 11 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 26 January 2026 | 5 hours 49 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
Delay causes
Why F9 689 runs late
Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 11,000 reported delay minutes.
- 41%National Airspace System
- 36%Late-arriving aircraft
- 13%Extreme weather
- 11%Carrier
Extreme weather accounts for 13% of delay minutes, well above the single-digit share typical across the system. Weather delays are lumpy: they arrive as whole bad days rather than as a steady drag, so the quarterly figures above are the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 2.1 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 10,979 delay minutes reported on F9 689.
Cancellations sit at 1.63% against a national 1.89%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.33%.
Connections and routes
What a delay on this flight costs
14.7% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
The 1,476 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.
Every one of the 306 flights under F9 689 in the data flew DCA to DEN. 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. 306 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 F9 689
For a booking, F9 689 is a flight to put a long connection behind. 14.7% of its completed flights arrived an hour or more late, which a short layover will not absorb. If the onward flight is on a separate ticket, the risk sits with you.
Related
Where to go next
- DCA to DEN, every carrier and departure
- DEN to DCA, the return direction
- United Airlines 746 on the same route78.3%
- Frontier Airlines 685 on the same route85.6%
- Frontier Airlines 687 on the same route80.7%
- Ronald Reagan Washington National (DCA) delay statistics
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- Frontier Airlines on-time record
- Every Frontier 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 Frontier 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, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.