Route reliability record
CLT→TYS
Charlotte to Knoxville
- Flights
- 866
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 176 mi
- Carriers
- 4
This route sits in the middle of the pack with a C. About seven flights in ten arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 8 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. The late ones land a little over an hour behind schedule. That rests on 866 CLT to TYS flights, with a median arrival 4 minutes early.
Best time to fly CLT to TYS: a 11am–2pm departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 84.4% of the time and Tuesday flights 75.6%, against 70.0% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so this route runs 8 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 76 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
70.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 843 completed flights
Avg delay
77 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.42%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
PSA
68.7% on time across 606 flights
These figures cover 866 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 12.6% 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.
Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on CLT to TYS
Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Airthin sample | 26 | 88.5% | 36 min | 0.00% | A+ |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 41 | 73.2% | 93 min | 0.00% | C+ |
| American Airlinesthin sample | 193 | 70.8% | 74 min | 0.52% | C+ |
| PSA Airlines | 606 | 68.7% | 78 min | 3.30% | C− |
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 18 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am114 flights83.3%
- 11am–2pm32 flights84.4%
- 2pm–5pm115 flights70.3%
- 5pm–8pm236 flights67.2%
- 8pm–5am369 flights66.4%
Scale runs 60% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The best window here is not the first bank but the 11am–2pm slot at 84.4% on time, ahead of 8pm–5am at 66.4%. Where the curve peaks mid-day rather than at dawn, the constraint is usually congestion at one end rather than the aircraft's own rotation. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 369 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 35 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
July is the worst month at 52.9% on time, 35 points below November, the best at 88.2%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. September was the busiest month here, with 103 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 75.6% on time and Sunday the weakest at 63.9%. 12 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
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 20,000 reported delay minutes.
- 42%Late-arriving aircraft
- 38%Carrier
- 10%National Airspace System
- 10%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
42% 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 20,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 4 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 19,549 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 38%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 7,409 of the 20,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations sit at 2.42% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.23%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 12.6% 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.
At 176 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 11am–2pm window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 79.0% on time across 867 flights, 9 points above this direction. Departure banks, aircraft rotations and the congestion at each end all differ, so scoring the two directions together would average away a real 9 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 866 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in TYS after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 866 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 70.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 843 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
CLT to TYS questions
How often is CLT to TYS delayed?
Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 30.0% of the 866 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
How reliable is CLT to TYS compared with the rest of the country?
70.0% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 8 points against it. That is worth a C on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on CLT to TYS?
The 11am–2pm departure window is the strongest at 84.4% on time. The 8pm–5am window is the weakest at 66.4%, 18 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are July delays on CLT to TYS?
July is the weakest month at 52.9% on time, compared with 88.2% in November. Across the year that is 35 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- TYS to CLT — the return legseparate record
- Charlotte Douglas International (CLT) delay statistics
- American Airlines on CLT to TYS70.8%
- PSA Airlines on CLT to TYS68.7%
- CLT to MCO, a related route70.6%
- ORD to TYS, a related route66.7%
- CLT to ATL, a related route83.3%
- Envoy Air on-time record88.5%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record73.2%
- American Airlines on-time record70.8%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
Direction matters. CLT to TYS and TYS to CLT are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
Embed CLT to TYS’s on-time badge on your site
Paste this into a web page. The badge shows the current on-time rate, cancellation rate and grade, and updates every month. Preview it, or build a badge for another route or airport.
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.