Carrier route record
B6JFK→DCA
JetBlue Airways · New York to Washington
- Flights
- 446
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 18%
- Carriers
- 2
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with JetBlue Airways.
JetBlue on JFK to DCA earns an F−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 54.5% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 23 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average an hour and a half. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 446 flights, with a median arrival 10 minutes late.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so JetBlue on JFK to DCA runs 23 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 231 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
54.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 422 completed flights
Avg delay
84 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
5.16%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
67.8%
Every carrier on JFK to DCA, 2,528 flights
These figures cover 446 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 21.6% 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
JetBlue against every carrier on JFK to DCA
JetBlue flew 446 of the 2,528 flights on JFK to DCA, about 18% of it. Its 54.5% on time is 13 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 67.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 70.7% to JetBlue at 54.5%.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Republic Airways | 2,082 | 70.7% | 67 min | 5.38% | C− |
| JetBlue Airways (this page) | 446 | 54.5% | 84 min | 5.16% | F− |
Departure window
When JetBlue runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 15 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–8am—
- 8am–11am—
- 11am–2pm35 flights41.2%
- 2pm–5pm2 flights—
- 5pm–8pm45 flights50.0%
- 8pm–5am364 flights56.4%
Scale runs 35% to 60%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 41.2% on time against 56.4% for 8pm–5am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 364 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
JetBlue on JFK to DCA through the year
April is the best month on the calendar at 80.0% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. November was the busiest month here, with 59 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 66.7% on time and Thursday the weakest at 44.3%. 22 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why JetBlue runs late on this route
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 16,000 reported delay minutes.
- 39%Late-arriving aircraft
- 32%National Airspace System
- 29%Carrier
- 0%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
39% 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 16,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 39 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 16,042 reported delay minutes.
32% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 5,141 minutes out of 16,000, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations run at 5.16%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about 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. 21.6% 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 213 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 8pm–5am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 81.9% on time across 446 flights, 27 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 27 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 446 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 JetBlue on JFK to DCA
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 5.16% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; 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. 422 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- JFK to DCA, every carrier
- JetBlue on DCA to JFK, the return leg
- Republic Airways on JFK to DCA70.7%
- JetBlue Airways network-wide record
- John F. Kennedy International (JFK) delay statistics
- Ronald Reagan Washington National (DCA) 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.