Route reliability record
FLL→DCA
Fort Lauderdale to Washington
- Flights
- 2,303
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 899 mi
- Carriers
- 3
This route draws a C. About one flight in three arrive 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 2,303 flights, of which JetBlue Airways flew 1,362 at 68.6% on time.
JetBlue Airways is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 68.6% on time across 1,362 flights.
Key figures
On time
67.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,245 completed flights
Avg delay
75 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.87%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
JetBlue
68.6% on time across 1,362 flights
These figures cover 2,303 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 12.4% 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
Which airline is most reliable on FLL to DCA
The three carriers here are closely matched: 5 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JetBlue Airways | 1,362 | 68.6% | 74 min | 2.06% | C |
| American Airlines | 576 | 67.1% | 81 min | 1.74% | C |
| Southwest Airlines | 365 | 64.0% | 68 min | 1.37% | D |
No carrier stands out. JetBlue tops the table at 68.6%, 5 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
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 38 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am292 flights91.8%
- 8am–11am247 flights76.1%
- 11am–2pm568 flights70.5%
- 2pm–5pm388 flights63.9%
- 5pm–8pm479 flights54.0%
- 8pm–5am329 flights58.2%
Scale runs 45% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 54.0% on time, against 91.8% 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 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 568 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 24 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.
July is the worst month at 55.8% on time, 24 points below September, the best at 79.7%. 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. December was the busiest month here, with 233 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 74.1% on time and Sunday the weakest at 56.7%. 17 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 55,000 reported delay minutes.
- 42%Late-arriving aircraft
- 28%Carrier
- 27%National Airspace System
- 3%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
42% 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 55,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 12 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 54,681 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 91.8% on time here.
Cancellations sit at 1.87% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.65%.
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. 12.4% 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.
The 899 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 runs 68.3% on time across 2,302 flights, within about a point of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
The sample behind these figures is 2,303 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. September runs 79.7% on time and July 55.8%, a swing of 24 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of July before you think about anything else. 2,245 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
FLL to DCA questions
How often is FLL to DCA delayed?
About one flight in three arrive at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 32.5% of the 2,303 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
Which airline is most reliable on FLL to DCA?
JetBlue Airways leads at 68.6% on time across 1,362 flights. Southwest Airlines is at the other end on 64.0%, a gap of 5 points. Sample size matters as much as the percentage: a rate built from a few hundred flights moves around far more than one built from ten thousand.
What time of day has the fewest delays on FLL to DCA?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 91.8% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 54.0%, 38 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 July delays on FLL to DCA?
July is the weakest month at 55.8% on time, compared with 79.7% in September. Across the year that is 24 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
- DCA to FLL — the return legseparate record
- Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL) delay statistics
- Ronald Reagan Washington National (DCA) delay statistics
- JetBlue Airways on-time record68.6%
- American Airlines on-time record67.1%
- Southwest Airlines on-time record64.0%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
Direction matters. FLL to DCA and DCA to FLL are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, July 2025 to June 2026. Updated monthly. How this data is collected.