Carrier route record
AADCA→RDU
American Airlines · Washington to Raleigh
- Flights
- 207
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 10%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with American Airlines.
American on DCA to RDU 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 207 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Envoy Air, flew 448 at 74.2% on time.
Envoy Air is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 74.2% on time across 448 flights.
Key figures
On time
65.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 201 completed flights
Avg delay
74 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.90%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
69.3%
Every carrier on DCA to RDU, 1,990 flights
These figures cover 207 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 16.4% 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
American against every carrier on DCA to RDU
American flew 207 of the 1,990 flights on DCA to RDU, about 10% of it. Its 65.2% on time is 4 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 69.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 74.2% to American at 65.2%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Envoy Air arrives on time 74.2% of the time; PSA Airlines manages 66.8%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 840 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Air | 448 | 74.2% | 74 min | 4.02% | C− |
| Republic Airways | 495 | 70.8% | 70 min | 6.46% | C− |
| PSA Airlines | 840 | 66.8% | 64 min | 5.12% | C− |
| American Airlines (this page)thin sample | 207 | 65.2% | 74 min | 2.90% | C |
Republic Airways cancels 6.5% of what it schedules here, the highest in the table. A cancelled flight never appears in an on-time rate, so read that column alongside the punctuality one rather than after it.
Departure window
When American 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 207 flights.
- 5am–8am5 flights—
- 8am–11am1 flights—
- 11am–2pm31 flights60.0%
- 2pm–5pm2 flights—
- 5pm–8pm36 flights62.9%
- 8pm–5am132 flights65.4%
Scale runs 50% to 70%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 60.0% on time against 65.4% for 8pm–5am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 132 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
American on DCA to RDU through the year
- Jul–Sep 2025107 flights59.0%
- Oct–Dec 202549 flights77.1%
- Jan–Mar 202610 flights—
- Apr–Jun 202641 flights67.5%
Scale runs 50% to 85%. 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 65.2% on time across 207 flights.
American on DCA to RDU did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Oct–Dec 2025 at 77.1% on time and its weakest Jul–Sep 2025 at 59.0%, a swing of 18 points on roughly 69 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, Friday is the strongest day at 76.3% on time and Sunday the weakest at 50.0%. 26 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why American runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 70% of the 5,196 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.
- 70%Late-arriving aircraft
- 21%Carrier
- 7%National Airspace System
- 2%Extreme weather
70% 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 5,196 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 30 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 5,196 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations run at 2.90%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly one flight in 30 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. 16.4% 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 227 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 8pm–5am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 75.4% on time across 205 flights, 10 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 10 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 207 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 American on DCA to RDU
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 2.90% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 8pm–5am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 201 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DCA to RDU, every carrier
- American on RDU to DCA, the return leg
- Envoy Air on DCA to RDU74.2%
- Republic Airways on DCA to RDU70.8%
- PSA Airlines on DCA to RDU66.8%
- American Airlines network-wide record
- Ronald Reagan Washington National (DCA) delay statistics
- Raleigh-Durham International (RDU) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
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.