Flight number record
F9 689
Frontier Airlines · Washington to Denver
- Route
- DCA → DEN
- Departs
- 18:00
- Flights
- 305
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 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 305 flights, with a median arrival right on schedule.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so F9 689 runs 13 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 125 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
65.1%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 301 completed flights
Avg delay
106 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.31%
National rate is 1.81%
1 hour+ late
16.3%
National rate is 8.1%
These figures cover 305 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 16.3% 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 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 279 of the 305 scheduled departures in the data, so the figures below describe one steady operation rather than a number that moved around the clock.
- Departs 18:00279 flights91.5%
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 18:00 departure sits in the 5pm–8pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 68.2%, and F9 689 runs 3 points worse at 65.1%. 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
F9 689 next to DCA to DEN
Every carrier on DCA to DEN combined arrived on time 78.5% of the time across 1,349 flights, so F9 689 is 13 points behind it. Frontier flew 984 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 78.4% on time. Across its whole network Frontier Airlines managed 73.2%, which this flight trails by 8 points.
| Compared with | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| F9 689thin sample | 305 | 65.1% | 106 min | 1.31% | C |
| All Frontier Airlines on DCA–DEN | 984 | 78.4% | 80 min | 0.91% | B+ |
| All carriers on DCA–DEN | 1,349 | 78.5% | 86 min | 0.74% | B+ |
| Frontier Airlines, whole network | 205,332 | 73.2% | 84 min | 1.85% | 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 2025 at 49.4%, a swing of 24 points on roughly 76 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 202577 flights49.4%
- Oct–Dec 202579 flights73.4%
- Jan–Mar 202673 flights67.1%
- Apr–Jun 202676 flights70.7%
Scale runs 40% to 80%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
By weekday, F9 689 did best on Saturday at 76.0% on time and worst on Thursday at 58.0%. Each day rests on about 44 flights, so a gap of 18 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.
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.
- 36%Late-arriving aircraft
- 30%National Airspace System
- 21%Extreme weather
- 14%Carrier
Extreme weather accounts for 21% 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 3.3 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 11,128 delay minutes reported on F9 689.
Cancellations sit at 1.31% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
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. 16.3% 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 1,476 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. 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 305 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. 305 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. 16.3% 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 route78.8%
- Frontier Airlines 685 on the same route84.8%
- Frontier Airlines 687 on the same route83.9%
- 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, July 2025 to June 2026. Last updated 15 September 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.