Carrier route record

AADFW→BHM

American Airlines · Dallas-Fort Worth to Birmingham

Flights: 111
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 5%
Carriers: 4

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

American on DFW to BHM earns an F−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 46.2% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 31 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average close to two hours. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 111 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Envoy Air, flew 740 at 80.4% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so American on DFW to BHM runs 31 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 314 extra late arrivals.

On time

46.2%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 106 completed flights

Avg delay

102 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

4.50%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

74.0%

Every carrier on DFW to BHM, 2,202 flights

These figures cover 111 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 25.5% 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 DFW to BHM

American flew 111 of the 2,202 flights on DFW to BHM, about 5% of it. Its 46.2% on time is 28 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 74.0%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 80.4% to American at 46.2%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Envoy Air arrives on time 80.4% of the time; PSA Airlines manages 71.5%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,137 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on DFW to BHM
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Envoy Air	740	80.4%	65 min	1.89%	B
SkyWest Airlinesthin sample	214	79.2%	93 min	3.27%	B−
PSA Airlines	1,137	71.5%	91 min	3.52%	C−
American Airlines (this page)thin sample	111	46.2%	102 min	4.50%	F−

PSA Airlines cancels 3.5% 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 111 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split American's DFW to BHM record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 46.2% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

American on DFW to BHM through the year

Jul–Sep 20251 flights—
Oct–Dec 202568 flights57.6%
Jan–Mar 20262 flights—
Apr–Jun 202640 flights29.7%

Scale runs 20% to 65%. 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 46.2% on time across 111 flights.

Split by quarter, American on DFW to BHM logged 1 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 68 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 2 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 40 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 46.2% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why American runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 49% of the 5,836 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.

Carrier
49%
Late-arriving aircraft
43%
Extreme weather
4%
National Airspace System
4%

43% 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 5,836 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 11 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 5,836 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 49%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 2,873 of the 5,836 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations run at 4.50%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly one flight in twenty 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. 25.5% 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 597 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 69.5% on time across 110 flights, 23 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 23 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 111 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 DFW to BHM

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.50% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you close to two hours; 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. 106 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