Carrier route record

WNDEN→RIC

Southwest Airlines · Denver to Richmond

Flights: 290
Period: September 2025 to August 2026
Share of route: 35%
Carriers: 3

Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.

Southwest on DEN to RIC draws a D. Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is roughly 40 minutes behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 290 flights, with a median arrival 8 minutes late.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so Southwest on DEN to RIC runs 14 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 143 extra late arrivals.

On time

63.0%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 284 completed flights

Avg delay

39 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.03%

National rate is 1.89%

Whole route

71.7%

Every carrier on DEN to RIC, 818 flights

These figures cover 290 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. On-time means an arrival less than 15 minutes after the scheduled gate time, the same threshold the Department of Transportation uses in its own reports. Cancelled and diverted flights are excluded from the on-time rate and counted separately, which is why the cancellation column matters on its own.

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Carrier by carrier

Southwest against every carrier on DEN to RIC

Southwest flew 290 of the 818 flights on DEN to RIC, about 35% of it. Its 63.0% on time is 9 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 71.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Frontier at 88.8% to Southwest at 63.0%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

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 DEN to RIC
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	89	88.8%	55 min	0.00%	A+
United Airlines	439	73.9%	67 min	0.68%	C+
Southwest Airlines (this page)thin sample	290	63.0%	39 min	1.03%	D

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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 20 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier.

5am–8am—
8am–11am74 flights76.4%
11am–2pm172 flights56.5%
2pm–5pm30 flights—
5pm–8pm14 flights—
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 50% to 80%. 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 56.5% on time against 76.4% for 8am–11am. 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 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 172 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Southwest on DEN to RIC through the year

Jul–Sep 202530 flights—
Oct–Dec 202567 flights61.2%
Jan–Mar 202657 flights73.6%
Apr–Jun 202682 flights56.8%
Jul–Sep 202654 flights61.1%

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 63.0% on time across 290 flights.

Southwest on DEN to RIC did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jan–Mar 2026 at 73.6% on time and its weakest Apr–Jun 2026 at 56.8%, a swing of 17 points on roughly 73 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, Sunday is the strongest day at 75.0% on time and Saturday the weakest at 50.0%, a spread of 25 points.

Arrival by arrival

How late Southwest on DEN to RIC runs when it is late

Most of the lateness is short. 60 of the 105 late arrivals were under half an hour behind, and 14 reached an hour or more.

15+ min early15 flights5.3%
Within 15 min164 flights57.7%
15–29 min late60 flights21.1%
30–59 min late31 flights10.9%
1–2 hours late10 flights3.5%
2+ hours late4 flights1.4%

Scale runs 0% to 100%.

Share of 284 completed flights by arrival against schedule.

31 of 116 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 27% of them. In the other direction, 20 flights left on time yet arrived 15 minutes late or more, so that delay built up after pushback: in the air, in a holding pattern or on the ground at RIC.

The worst days

Worst days for Southwest on DEN to RIC

The latest arrival of the period was on 19 December 2025, 3 hours 36 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. The same cause led on four of the five worst days.

The latest arrivals of Southwest on DEN to RIC in the period
Date	Arrived late by	Largest filed cause
19 December 2025	3 hours 36 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
15 August 2026	3 hours 30 minutes	Extreme weather
6 March 2026	2 hours 44 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
9 September 2025	2 hours 17 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
17 February 2026	1 hour 59 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft

Delay causes

Why Southwest runs late on this route

Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 44% of the 4,080 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.

Late-arriving aircraft
44%
Carrier
36%
National Airspace System
17%
Extreme weather
3%

44% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 4,080 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 14 to one. The split is drawn from 4,080 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 36%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 1,464 of the 4,080 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations sit at 1.03% against a national 1.89%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 1.03%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.9% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Connections built on this flight are about as safe as US domestic connections get, though a cancelled flight still ignores every layover you give it.

The 1,481 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.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 50.3% on time across 290 flights, 13 points below 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 13 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 290 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 DEN to RIC

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 290 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 63.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 284 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated 22 October 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.

Key figures