Carrier route record

AAXNA→CLT

American Airlines · Bentonville to Charlotte

Flights: 207
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 14%
Carriers: 3

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

American on XNA to CLT earns an A+. Close to nine flights in ten arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 11 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about 3.5 hours. That rests on 207 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Envoy Air, flew 627 at 88.6% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, American's XNA to CLT record is 11 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 112 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

88.8%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 205 completed flights

Avg delay

213 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.48%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

86.3%

Every carrier on XNA to CLT, 1,483 flights

These figures cover 207 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 12 minutes early, which is the part an average hides: most flights here are fine, and the on-time rate is decided by a tail of badly late ones. On-time means under 15 minutes late, the DOT's own threshold.

Carrier by carrier

American against every carrier on XNA to CLT

American flew 207 of the 1,483 flights on XNA to CLT, about 14% of it. Its 88.8% on time is 3 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 86.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from American at 88.8% to PSA at 83.2%.

The two 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.

On-time performance by carrier on XNA to CLT
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
American Airlines (this page)thin sample	207	88.8%	213 min	0.48%	A+
Envoy Air	627	88.6%	49 min	1.75%	A
PSA Airlines	649	83.2%	121 min	2.62%	B

No carrier stands out. Envoy tops the table at 88.6%, 5 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.

Departure window

When American runs best on this route

Departure time is the single lever a traveller controls, and it moves the odds more than most people expect. Each bar below is the on-time rate for flights scheduled to leave inside that window, across 207 flights.

5am–8am85 flights85.9%
8am–11am68 flights94.0%
11am–2pm46 flights89.1%
2pm–5pm4 flights—
5pm–8pm4 flights—
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 75% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 94.0% of the time, against 85.9% for the early window. That is 8 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 85 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

American on XNA to CLT through the year

Jul–Sep 2025132 flights87.1%
Oct–Dec 202563 flights93.5%
Apr–Jun 202612 flights—

Scale runs 80% to 100%. 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 88.8% on time across 207 flights.

Split by quarter, American on XNA to CLT logged 132 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 63 flights in Oct–Dec 2025 and 12 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 88.8% annual figure is the one to use.

Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 96.8% on time and Monday the weakest at 83.3%. 14 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why American runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 66% of the 4,898 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.

Carrier
66%
Late-arriving aircraft
29%
Extreme weather
3%
National Airspace System
2%

The largest share of delay minutes, 66%, 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 3,244 of the 4,898 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 4,898 reported delay minutes.

The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 94.0% on time here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.48%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Roughly one flight in 100 is called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

6.3% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last about 3.5 hours, which a normal layover absorbs.

The 754 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 80.9% on time across 206 flights, 8 points below 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. 207 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 American on XNA to CLT

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 207 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 88.8% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 205 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