Route reliability record
DFW→ORF
Dallas-Fort Worth to Norfolk
- Flights
- 998
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 1,212 mi
- Carriers
- 3
This route draws a D−. About one flight in three 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 998 DFW to ORF flights, with a median arrival 1 minute early.
Best time to fly DFW to ORF: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 78.9% of the time and Tuesday flights 74.4%, against 64.6% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so this route runs 13 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 130 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
64.6%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 962 completed flights
Avg delay
67 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.01%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
American
63.9% on time across 938 flights
These figures cover 998 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 13.3% 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
Which airline is most reliable on DFW to ORF
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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Airthin sample | 21 | 76.2% | 40 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 39 | 74.4% | 82 min | 0.00% | C+ |
| American Airlines | 938 | 63.9% | 66 min | 3.20% | D− |
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 25 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am38 flights78.9%
- 8am–11am208 flights78.9%
- 11am–2pm175 flights75.1%
- 2pm–5pm215 flights57.8%
- 5pm–8pm362 flights53.6%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 45% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 53.6% on time, against 78.9% for the 5am–8am 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 362 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 38 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
June is the worst month at 48.8% on time, 38 points below October, the best at 86.7%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. July was the busiest month here, with 109 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 74.4% on time and Saturday the weakest at 54.5%. 20 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 52% of the 23,000 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.
- 52%Late-arriving aircraft
- 32%Carrier
- 12%National Airspace System
- 3%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
52% 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 23,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 17 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 22,674 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 78.9% on time here.
Cancellations run at 3.01%, 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 actually costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 13.3% 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 1,212 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 71.8% on time across 998 flights, 7 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 7 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 998 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in ORF after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.01% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you about an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 5am–8am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 962 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
DFW to ORF questions
How often is DFW to ORF delayed?
About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 35.4% of the 998 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by about an hour on average.
How reliable is DFW to ORF compared with the rest of the country?
64.6% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 13 points against it. That is worth a D− on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on DFW to ORF?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 78.9% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 53.6%, 25 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are June delays on DFW to ORF?
June is the weakest month at 48.8% on time, compared with 86.7% in October. Across the year that is 38 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- ORF to DFW — the return legseparate record
- Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW) delay statistics
- DFW to ORD, a related route67.6%
- ATL to ORF, a related route79.0%
- DFW to LGA, a related route67.1%
- Envoy Air on-time record76.2%
- Frontier Airlines on-time record74.4%
- American Airlines on-time record63.9%
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
Direction matters. DFW to ORF and ORF to DFW are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.