Route profile
DFW→PHL
Flight reliability, delays and best times to fly from Dallas–Fort Worth to Philadelphia, 1,303 miles.
Right now
Aviation weather is not currently a factor.
Aviation weather is not currently a factor.
Route reliability
July 2023 – July 2026
Better than 8% of comparable major US routes (4,598 compared)
Calculated from 10,714 flights. How this is calculated
DFW → PHL arrives on time 71.5% of the time; the return trip, PHL → DFW, arrives on time 76.4% of the time, a 4.9-point gap between the two directions of the same city pair.
DFW → PHL spends 27.0 minutes on the ground on a 1,303-mile trip: 18.9 minutes from pushback to wheels-up at DFW and 8.2 minutes from touchdown to gate at PHL.
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics · Data covering July 2023 – July 2026
Why DFW → PHL flights are cancelled
July 2023 – July 2026
DFW → PHL cancelled 276 of 10,714 scheduled flights — about 1 in every 39. The reason filed most often was extreme weather, 80.8% of the cancellations coded on this route — about 1 in every 48 scheduled flights.
Share of cancellations
Of 276 cancelled departures carrying a reason code.
What each reason means
Conditions the carrier judged severe enough to stop the flight: a blizzard, a hurricane, a line of thunderstorms.
223 cancellations, 80.8% of the total.
Crew, maintenance, aircraft cleaning, baggage or fueling: what BTS counts as within the carrier’s own control.
43 cancellations, 15.6% of the total.
Airport capacity, air traffic control flow programs, heavy traffic and ordinary bad weather. A system decision, not the airline’s.
10 cancellations, 3.6% of the total.
A terminal evacuation, a security breach, screening equipment failure, or screening queues over 29 minutes.
0 cancellations, 0.0% of the total.
Reason codes are the operating airline’s own filing with US DOT, not an independent finding of fault. With only one or two carriers on the route, the split mostly reflects how they file. Ordinary bad weather is filed under air traffic, so weather’s full share is larger than its bar.
276 coded cancellations were recorded on DFW → PHL; the section appears from 50.
When it goes wrong
July 2023 – July 2026
66 min late
against a median of 3 min early
DFW → PHL has an average that understates its risk: a typical arrival is 3 min early, but the worst tenth are 69 minutes worse than that. If the trip has something unmissable at the end of it, the median is the wrong number to plan against.
Percentiles over 10,714 operations; cancelled and diverted flights are counted separately.
Will your connection be tight enough?
Layovers at PHL after arriving from DFW.
| Connection time | Chance of missing | Reads as |
|---|---|---|
| 30 min | 45% | Likely to miss |
| 45 min | 28% | High risk |
| 60 min | 19% | High risk |
| 90 min | 11% | Some risk |
| 120 min | 6.6% | Some risk |
This is one leg of a connection. Gate changes and the next flight's own schedule matter too. And a connection can fail before delay is even the question — this route cancels 2.58% of the time and diverts 0.21% of the time, which a late arrival never shows up in.
Chance of missing is the share of 10,416 arrivals on this route that landed later than the connection time less 30 minutes to reach the next gate.
The worst tenth of arrivals on this route land at least 66 minutes late (90th-percentile gate arrival delay), over 10,714 operations.
Any other layover length: connection checker.
Best time to fly
DFW → PHL flights departing 5–9 AM arrived on time 85.7% of the time, against 57.9% for 6–9 PM departures, a gap of 27.8 percentage points.
By departure window
By departure hour
- 12 AM to 4 AM: too few flights to score
- 5 AM: 86.0% on time from 1,185 flights
- 6 AM: too few flights to score
- 7 AM: 85.5% on time from 1,106 flights
- 8 AM: 85.1% on time from 1,118 flights
- 9 AM: 78.2% on time from 143 flights
- 10 AM: 82.0% on time from 1,034 flights
- 11 AM: too few flights to score
- 12 PM: 68.0% on time from 685 flights
- 1 PM: 68.2% on time from 748 flights
- 2 PM: 59.7% on time from 300 flights
- 3 PM: 51.5% on time from 879 flights
- 4 PM: 70.0% on time from 672 flights
- 5 PM: 59.6% on time from 675 flights
- 6 PM: 59.2% on time from 785 flights
- 7 PM: 59.5% on time from 449 flights
- 8 PM: 55.3% on time from 672 flights
- 9 PM to 11 PM: too few flights to score
Departure windows with fewer than 120 flights are not scored.
Why DFW → PHL runs late
July 2023 – July 2026
the inbound aircraft was late, so this flight started late
crew, maintenance, boarding and fueling, all within the carrier’s control
airspace and airport capacity, including weather-driven flow control
weather severe enough to stop this flight specifically
screening or terminal security incidents
Share of the delay minutes US DOT attributed to each cause for DFW → PHL. Only delays of 15 minutes or more are attributed.
Late-arriving aircraft is the largest cause on DFW → PHL, at 45.6%: flights here mostly leave late because the plane came in late, and the day shows it: 5–9 AM departures arrived on time 85.7% of the time and 6–9 PM departures 57.9%.
How this route holds up in bad weather
July 2023 – July 2026
The harder-hit end is the one the flight leaves from, where a cancellation keeps it from departing at all. Bad weather cancels 7.0 times the normal rate at DFW against 4.3 times at PHL. Cancelled in bad weather against normal hours: DFW 10.4% against 1.5%, PHL 6.5% against 1.5%. Flights that did leave DFW in bad weather arrived on time 56.4% of the time, against 74.4% in normal hours.
Bad weather and normal hours at the airports
Scheduled departures, July 2023 – July 2026| Departures from | DFW | PHL |
|---|---|---|
| Cancelled in bad weather | 10.4% | 6.5% |
| Cancelled in normal hours | 1.5% | 1.5% |
| Arrived on time, bad weather | 56.4% | 64.3% |
| Arrived on time, normal hours | 74.4% | 78.2% |
| Departures in bad weather | 72,822 | 32,038 |
Frontier Airlines (5.9% cancelled against 10.5% for the other carriers at DFW) cancelled fewer departures from DFW in bad weather than the other carriers there did in the same months. None of the route’s other carriers was clearly worse.
This route’s airlines in bad weather at DFW
All departures from DFW| Airline | Bad-weather departures | Cancelled | Other carriers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frontier Airlines | 2,192 | 5.9%below the others | 10.5% |
| American Airlines | 38,491 | 10.0%about level | 10.9% |
These are airport figures, not route figures: every scheduled departure from DFW and PHL, to any destination, in hours the weather report called bad. The airline rows count each carrier’s departures from DFW on every route.
Weather source and limits. In full: DFW (airlines), PHL, What Weather Costs Each Airport, Who Cancels More When the Weather Turns, Airports That Change Places When Weather Turns.
Airlines on this route
Carriers with at least 200 flights, by the airline that operated each one.
| Carrier | Flights | On time | Cancelled | Median delay | Severe |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| American Airlines | 9,681 | 72.1% | 2.55% | -3 min | 10.6% |
| Frontier Airlines | 885 | 64.5% | 2.71% | 0 min | 15.8% |
American Airlines flew 91.6% of the 10,566 flights listed.
American Airlines arrived on time 7.6 percentage points more often than Frontier Airlines on this route.
Flights on this route
Flight numbers with at least 600 operations here and still on the schedule.
| Flight | Scheduled | Operations | On time |
|---|---|---|---|
| AA402 American Airlines | 8:30 AM | 681 | 83.8% |
Weekly and seasonal patterns
By day of week
Wednesday is historically the most reliable day and Sunday the least, a gap of 6.2 percentage points.
By month
- Jan: 74.6%
- Feb: 80.3%
- Mar: 70.5%
- Apr: 73.1%
- May: 71.7%
- Jun: 64.1%
- Jul: 60.3%
- Aug: 65.5%
- Sep: 75.2%
- Oct: 76.8%
- Nov: 77.7%
- Dec: 76.3%
July is historically the weakest month and February the strongest, a spread of 20.0 percentage points.
Reliability over time
July 2023 – July 2026
- July 2023: 63.2% from 337 flights
- August 2023: 71.9% from 337 flights
- September 2023: 79.9% from 284 flights
- October 2023: 80.6% from 302 flights
- November 2023: 81.4% from 285 flights
- December 2023: 80.4% from 260 flights
- January 2024: 71.4% from 237 flights
- February 2024: 83.5% from 243 flights
- March 2024: 61.2% from 280 flights
- April 2024: 72.3% from 273 flights
- May 2024: 63.1% from 280 flights
- June 2024: 64.1% from 317 flights
- July 2024: 54.9% from 331 flights
- August 2024: 64.0% from 338 flights
- September 2024: 76.5% from 333 flights
- October 2024: 80.8% from 319 flights
- November 2024: 77.6% from 292 flights
- December 2024: 77.2% from 290 flights
- January 2025: 83.2% from 262 flights
- February 2025: 80.2% from 239 flights
- March 2025: 78.0% from 267 flights
- April 2025: 67.6% from 265 flights
- May 2025: 74.0% from 294 flights
- June 2025: 62.7% from 287 flights
- July 2025: 60.8% from 292 flights
- August 2025: 59.6% from 289 flights
- September 2025: 68.5% from 260 flights
- October 2025: 68.6% from 299 flights
- November 2025: 74.1% from 285 flights
- December 2025: 71.3% from 273 flights
- January 2026: 68.7% from 268 flights
- February 2026: 77.2% from 254 flights
- March 2026: 72.5% from 296 flights
- April 2026: 79.4% from 264 flights
- May 2026: 77.2% from 312 flights
- June 2026: 65.3% from 329 flights
- July 2026: 62.3% from 341 flights
Over the most recent 12 months (2025-08 to 2026-07), on-time arrivals averaged 70.1% against 73.4% in the 12 months before — declining by 3.3 percentage points.
Data and methodology
Calculated by FlyerIntel from 10,714 DFW → PHL flight records from the US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, covering July 2023 – July 2026. Late means 15 or more minutes past scheduled arrival; cancelled and diverted flights are left out of on-time rates.
Full methodology · Data sources · Report a problem
Related research: How Long a Layover Needs to Be · Two Airlines on One Route · Best Time of Day to Fly From Major US Airports
Analysis last recomputed