Carrier route record

OHDCA→CLT

PSA Airlines · Washington to Charlotte

Flights: 295
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 11%
Carriers: 2

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

PSA on DCA to CLT 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 295 flights, with a median arrival 2 minutes late.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so PSA on DCA to CLT runs 11 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 109 extra late arrivals.

On time

66.7%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 288 completed flights

Avg delay

82 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

2.37%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

78.5%

Every carrier on DCA to CLT, 2,677 flights

These figures cover 295 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 14.9% 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 CLT

PSA flew 295 of the 2,677 flights on DCA to CLT, about 11% of it. Its 66.7% on time is 12 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 78.5%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from American at 80.0% to PSA at 66.7%.

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.

On-time performance by carrier on DCA to CLT
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
American Airlines	2,382	80.0%	120 min	3.02%	B−
PSA Airlines (this page)thin sample	295	66.7%	82 min	2.37%	C

Departure window

When PSA runs best on this route

Departure time is the single lever a traveller controls, and it moves the odds more than most people expect. Each bar below is the on-time rate for flights scheduled to leave inside that window, across 295 flights.

5am–8am1 flights—
8am–11am2 flights—
11am–2pm153 flights67.5%
2pm–5pm9 flights—
5pm–8pm109 flights64.4%
8pm–5am21 flights—

Scale runs 55% to 75%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 11am–2pm window is the strongest at 67.5% on time. The full set of windows spans 3 points.

Across the year

PSA on DCA to CLT through the year

Jul–Sep 2025180 flights65.9%
Oct–Dec 202565 flights75.4%
Apr–Jun 202650 flights58.0%

Scale runs 50% to 80%. 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 66.7% on time across 295 flights.

PSA on DCA to CLT did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Oct–Dec 2025 at 75.4% on time and its weakest Apr–Jun 2026 at 58.0%, a swing of 17 points on roughly 98 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, Tuesday is the strongest day at 75.5% on time and Sunday the weakest at 52.5%. 23 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 51% of the 7,860 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
51%
Carrier
31%
National Airspace System
16%
Extreme weather
1%
Security
0%

51% 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 7,860 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 35 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 7,860 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations sit at 2.37% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.

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. 14.9% 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 331 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 72.0% on time across 300 flights, 5 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 5 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 295 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 CLT

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 295 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 66.7% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 288 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