Route reliability record
FLL→RIC
Fort Lauderdale to Richmond
- Flights
- 810
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 806 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route draws a C. 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 810 FLL to RIC flights, with a median arrival right on schedule.
Best time to fly FLL to RIC: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Wednesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 93.5% of the time and Wednesday flights 79.5%, against 65.8% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so this route runs 12 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 118 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
65.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 784 completed flights
Avg delay
67 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.84%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
JetBlue
65.7% on time across 552 flights
These figures cover 810 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 12.8% 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 RIC
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spirit Airlinesthin sample | 258 | 66.1% | 85 min | 3.88% | C− |
| JetBlue Airways | 552 | 65.7% | 59 min | 2.36% | C |
Flight by flight
Flights on FLL to RIC
The flight numbers below flew this route at least 250 times in the period, busiest first. Each has its own record, with its schedule and delay causes.
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 half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am31 flights93.5%
- 8am–11am90 flights85.4%
- 11am–2pm54 flights66.7%
- 2pm–5pm130 flights61.4%
- 5pm–8pm146 flights55.9%
- 8pm–5am359 flights63.7%
Scale runs 45% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 55.9% on time, against 93.5% 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 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 359 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 49 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.
May is the best month on the calendar at 87.0% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. March was the busiest month here, with 87 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 79.5% on time and Sunday the weakest at 56.7%. 23 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 18,000 reported delay minutes.
- 41%Late-arriving aircraft
- 37%Carrier
- 19%National Airspace System
- 2%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
41% 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 18,000 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 17,983 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 37%, 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 6,603 of the 18,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations run at 2.84%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly one flight in 40 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. 12.8% 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 806 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 74.1% on time across 809 flights, 8 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 8 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 810 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 RIC after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 2.84% 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. 784 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
FLL to RIC questions
How often is FLL to RIC 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 34.2% of the 810 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by about an hour on average.
How reliable is FLL to RIC compared with the rest of the country?
65.8% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 12 points against it. That is worth a C on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on FLL to RIC?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 93.5% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 55.9%, 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 March delays on FLL to RIC?
March is the weakest month at 37.8% on time, compared with 87.0% in May. Across the year that is 49 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
- RIC to FLL — the return legseparate record
- Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL) delay statistics
- Spirit Airlines on FLL to RIC66.1%
- JetBlue Airways on FLL to RIC65.7%
- FLL to ATL, a related route71.8%
- ATL to RIC, a related route81.2%
- FLL to EWR, a related route70.4%
- Spirit Airlines on-time record66.1%
- JetBlue Airways on-time record65.7%
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
Direction matters. FLL to RIC and RIC to FLL are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
Embed FLL to RIC’s on-time badge on your site
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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.