Carrier route record
WNDCA→FLL
Southwest Airlines · Washington to Fort Lauderdale
- Flights
- 365
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 16%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on DCA to FLL draws a D. Roughly one flight in two arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is about an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 365 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 576 at 72.7% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Southwest on DCA to FLL runs 18 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 177 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
59.9%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 359 completed flights
Avg delay
57 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.37%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
68.3%
Every carrier on DCA to FLL, 2,302 flights
These figures cover 365 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 10.9% 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
Southwest against every carrier on DCA to FLL
Southwest flew 365 of the 2,302 flights on DCA to FLL, about 16% of it. Its 59.9% on time is 8 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 68.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from American at 72.7% to Southwest at 59.9%.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 4 points separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| American Airlines | 576 | 72.7% | 66 min | 1.39% | C |
| JetBlue Airways | 1,361 | 68.7% | 78 min | 2.42% | C |
| Southwest Airlines (this page) | 365 | 59.9% | 57 min | 1.37% | D |
No carrier stands out. American tops the table at 72.7%, 4 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Departure window
When Southwest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 12 points, against 4 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am22 flights—
- 8am–11am10 flights—
- 11am–2pm96 flights65.6%
- 2pm–5pm98 flights56.1%
- 5pm–8pm135 flights53.8%
- 8pm–5am4 flights—
Scale runs 45% to 70%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 53.8% on time, against 65.6% for the 11am–2pm 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 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 135 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on DCA to FLL through the year
December is the weak month at 41.9% on time, against 83.3% in March. Winter delays cluster: a single storm system can account for most of a month's shortfall, so an average December hides both very good weeks and genuinely unflyable days. March was the busiest month here, with 31 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 77.4% on time and Sunday the weakest at 38.8%. 39 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Southwest runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 60% of the 8,181 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.
- 60%Late-arriving aircraft
- 23%Carrier
- 15%National Airspace System
- 1%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
60% 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 8,181 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 60 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 8,181 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations sit at 1.37% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.27%.
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. 10.9% 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.
The 899 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 64.0% on time across 365 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 365 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 Southwest on DCA to FLL
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 365 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 59.9% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 359 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DCA to FLL, every carrier
- Southwest on FLL to DCA, the return leg
- American Airlines on DCA to FLL72.7%
- JetBlue Airways on DCA to FLL68.7%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Ronald Reagan Washington National (DCA) delay statistics
- Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.