Flight number record

F9 690

Frontier Airlines · Denver to Washington

Route: DEN → DCA
Departs: 16:38
Flights: 359
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s F9 690, check with Frontier Airlines.

F9 690 draws a C+. About one flight in three 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 359 flights, with a median arrival 5 minutes early.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so F9 690 runs 12 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 123 extra late arrivals.

On time

65.3%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 357 completed flights

Avg delay

78 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.56%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

16.8%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 359 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 16.8% 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 690 flies

F9 690 flies DEN to DCA without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 16:38, used on 111 of 359 flights, with 16:27 (57 flights) and 16:28 (49 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 16:38111 flights30.9%
Departs 16:2757 flights15.9%
Departs 16:2849 flights13.6%

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 16:38 departure sits in the 2pm–5pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 72.4%, and F9 690 runs 7 points worse at 65.3%. Midday slots inherit some of the morning's delays without yet carrying the full weight of the evening's.

Against the route

F9 690 next to DEN to DCA

Every carrier on DEN to DCA combined arrived on time 81.2% of the time across 1,351 flights, so F9 690 is 16 points behind it. Frontier flew 986 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.

F9 690 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
F9 690thin sample	359	65.3%	78 min	0.56%	C+
All Frontier Airlines on DEN–DCA	986	78.4%	76 min	0.81%	B+
All carriers on DEN–DCA	1,351	81.2%	73 min	0.67%	B+
Frontier Airlines, whole network	205,332	73.2%	84 min	1.85%	C

Across the year

F9 690 quarter by quarter

F9 690 did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Oct–Dec 2025 at 78.7% on time and its weakest Jul–Sep 2025 at 51.6%, a swing of 27 points on roughly 90 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 202592 flights51.6%
Oct–Dec 202589 flights78.7%
Jan–Mar 202687 flights65.1%
Apr–Jun 202691 flights65.9%

Scale runs 45% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, F9 690 did best on Saturday at 82.4% on time and worst on Thursday at 56.9%. Each day rests on about 51 flights, so a gap of 26 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.

Delay causes

Why F9 690 runs late

One category carries most of the weight here. National Airspace System accounts for 50% of the 9,718 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.

National Airspace System
50%
Late-arriving aircraft
30%
Carrier
16%
Extreme weather
4%

50% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 4,823 minutes out of 9,718, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 9,718 delay minutes reported on F9 690.

Cancellations are rare at 0.56%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Roughly one flight in 100 is called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.

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. 16.8% 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 359 flights under F9 690 in the data flew DEN to DCA. 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. 359 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 690

For a booking, F9 690 is a flight to put a long connection behind. 16.8% 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.

Where to go next

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.

Key figures