Carrier route record

OHDCA→BNA

PSA Airlines · Washington to Nashville

Flights: 387
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 9%
Carriers: 5

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

PSA on DCA to BNA 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 387 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Republic Airways, flew 1,861 at 83.5% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so PSA on DCA to BNA runs 18 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 184 extra late arrivals.

On time

59.2%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 346 completed flights

Avg delay

78 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

10.08%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

77.1%

Every carrier on DCA to BNA, 4,329 flights

These figures cover 387 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.

Carrier by carrier

PSA against every carrier on DCA to BNA

PSA flew 387 of the 4,329 flights on DCA to BNA, about 9% of it. Its 59.2% on time is 18 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 77.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 83.5% to PSA at 59.2%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Republic Airways arrives on time 83.5% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 75.9%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,653 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on DCA to BNA
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Republic Airways	1,861	83.5%	61 min	2.26%	B
Southwest Airlines	1,653	75.9%	63 min	2.00%	B
Envoy Airthin sample	115	75.7%	65 min	0.00%	B+
American Airlinesthin sample	313	65.5%	75 min	5.43%	C−
PSA Airlines (this page)	387	59.2%	78 min	10.08%	D−

Republic leads Southwest by 8 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.

Departure window

When PSA runs best on this route

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 18 points, against 8 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am12 flights—
8am–11am43 flights65.0%
11am–2pm151 flights58.7%
2pm–5pm46 flights64.1%
5pm–8pm87 flights47.1%
8pm–5am48 flights64.3%

Scale runs 40% to 70%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 47.1% on time, against 65.0% for the 8am–11am slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 151 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

PSA on DCA to BNA through the year

Jul–Sep 202558 flights46.3%
Oct–Dec 202569 flights47.0%
Jan–Mar 2026143 flights61.7%
Apr–Jun 2026117 flights68.5%

Scale runs 40% to 75%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 59.2% on time across 387 flights.

PSA on DCA to BNA did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Apr–Jun 2026 at 68.5% on time and its weakest Jul–Sep 2025 at 46.3%, a swing of 22 points on roughly 97 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.

Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 81.2% on time and Friday the weakest at 44.6%. 37 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why PSA runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 62% of the 11,000 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.

Late-arriving aircraft
62%
Carrier
18%
National Airspace System
15%
Extreme weather
4%
Security
1%

62% 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 11,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 15 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 10,978 reported delay minutes.

The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 65.0% on time here.

Cancellations run at 10.08%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in ten 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 stage length

What a delay here 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 562 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.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 65.1% on time across 387 flights, 6 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 6 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 387 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 PSA on DCA to BNA

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 10.08% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 8am–11am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 346 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

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