Carrier route record

MQRDU→DCA

Envoy Air · Raleigh to Washington

Flights: 448
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 23%
Carriers: 5

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Envoy Air.

Envoy on RDU to DCA 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 448 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, PSA Airlines, flew 838 at 60.5% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Envoy on RDU to DCA runs 10 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 104 extra late arrivals.

On time

67.2%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 427 completed flights

Avg delay

67 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

4.69%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

63.3%

Every carrier on RDU to DCA, 1,989 flights

These figures cover 448 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 13.1% 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

Envoy against every carrier on RDU to DCA

Envoy flew 448 of the 1,989 flights on RDU to DCA, about 23% of it. Its 67.2% on time is 4 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 63.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from American at 75.4% to Frontier at 0.0%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The two carriers here are closely matched: about a point 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.

On-time performance by carrier on RDU to DCA
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
American Airlinesthin sample	205	75.4%	124 min	2.93%	B
Envoy Air (this page)	448	67.2%	67 min	4.69%	C−
PSA Airlines	838	60.5%	74 min	5.61%	D−
Republic Airways	497	59.4%	72 min	5.43%	D−
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	1	0.0%	891 min	0.00%	F+

PSA Airlines cancels 5.6% of what it schedules here, the highest in the table. A cancelled flight never appears in an on-time rate, so read that column alongside the punctuality one rather than after it.

Departure window

When Envoy runs best on this route

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 22 points, against about a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am—
8am–11am17 flights—
11am–2pm346 flights69.1%
2pm–5pm23 flights—
5pm–8pm27 flights—
8pm–5am35 flights46.9%

Scale runs 40% to 75%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 46.9% on time, against 69.1% for the 11am–2pm 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 346 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Envoy on RDU to DCA through the year

Jul–Sep 202536 flights—
Oct–Dec 2025109 flights71.0%
Jan–Mar 2026174 flights65.9%
Apr–Jun 2026129 flights69.0%

Scale runs 55% to 75%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 67.2% on time across 448 flights.

Quarter by quarter Envoy on RDU to DCA held fairly steady: 71.0% in Oct–Dec 2025, 65.9% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 69.0% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 5 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.

Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 85.4% on time and Friday the weakest at 48.3%. 37 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Envoy runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 47% of the 9,419 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.

Late-arriving aircraft
47%
National Airspace System
40%
Carrier
11%
Extreme weather
2%
Security
0%

47% 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 9,419 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 19 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 9,419 reported delay minutes.

40% 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 3,723 minutes out of 9,419, against a national NAS share of 21%.

Cancellations run at 4.69%, 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. 13.1% 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 227 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 11am–2pm window matters as much as it does.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 74.2% on time across 448 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. 448 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 Envoy on RDU to DCA

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.69% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you about an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 11am–2pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 427 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

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.

Key figures