Carrier route record
AADFW→LIT
American Airlines · Dallas-Fort Worth to Little Rock
- Flights
- 518
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 19%
- 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 LIT draws a D. Roughly one flight in two arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is an hour and a half behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 518 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Envoy Air, flew 1,656 at 80.5% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so American on DFW to LIT runs 18 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 184 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
59.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 503 completed flights
Avg delay
92 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.90%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
75.8%
Every carrier on DFW to LIT, 2,669 flights
These figures cover 518 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 20.1% 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 LIT
American flew 518 of the 2,669 flights on DFW to LIT, about 19% of it. Its 59.2% on time is 17 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 75.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 80.5% to American at 59.2%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Air | 1,656 | 80.5% | 60 min | 2.36% | B |
| PSA Airlinesthin sample | 92 | 77.3% | 81 min | 4.35% | B− |
| SkyWest Airlines | 403 | 77.0% | 66 min | 1.99% | B |
| American Airlines (this page) | 518 | 59.2% | 92 min | 2.90% | D |
No carrier stands out. Envoy tops the table at 80.5%, 4 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Departure window
When American runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 30 points, against 4 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am32 flights80.6%
- 11am–2pm43 flights76.2%
- 2pm–5pm124 flights50.8%
- 5pm–8pm45 flights72.5%
- 8pm–5am274 flights56.0%
Scale runs 40% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 80.6% of the time, against 50.8% for the afternoon window. That is 30 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 274 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
American on DFW to LIT through the year
December is the weak month at 45.8% on time, against 70.5% in May. 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 62 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 64.8% on time and Sunday the weakest at 49.3%. 16 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 55% of the 19,000 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.
- 55%Late-arriving aircraft
- 35%Carrier
- 5%Extreme weather
- 4%National Airspace System
55% 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 19,000 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 18,760 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 35%, 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 6,645 of the 19,000 delay minutes reported here.
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. 20.1% 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 304 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 8am–11am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 70.0% on time across 519 flights, 11 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 11 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 518 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 LIT
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 2.90% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 8am–11am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 503 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DFW to LIT, every carrier
- American on LIT to DFW, the return leg
- Envoy Air on DFW to LIT80.5%
- SkyWest Airlines on DFW to LIT77.0%
- American Airlines network-wide record
- Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW) 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.