Flight number record

DL 1038

Delta Air Lines · Raleigh to Fort Lauderdale

Route: RDU → FLL
Departs: 12:13
Flights: 364
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s DL 1038, check with Delta Air Lines.

DL 1038 lands a B, about a point better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 364 flights, with a median arrival 6 minutes early.

On time

78.8%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 358 completed flights

Avg delay

65 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.10%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

6.7%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 364 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 6 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.

Schedule

When DL 1038 flies

DL 1038 flies RDU to FLL without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 12:13, used on 58 of 364 flights, with 12:20 (56 flights) and 12:00 (41 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 12:1358 flights15.9%
Departs 12:2056 flights15.4%
Departs 12:0041 flights11.3%

Scale runs 0% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Share of scheduled departures at each local time. Times used on fewer than one flight in ten are not listed.

A 12:13 departure sits in the 11am–2pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 78.8%, and DL 1038 runs level with that at 78.8%. Midday slots inherit some of the morning's delays without yet carrying the full weight of the evening's.

Against the route

DL 1038 next to RDU to FLL

Every carrier on RDU to FLL combined arrived on time 78.0% of the time across 1,318 flights, so DL 1038 is about level with it. Across its whole network Delta Air Lines managed 81.6%, which this flight trails by 3 points.

DL 1038 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
DL 1038thin sample	364	78.8%	65 min	1.10%	B
All Delta Air Lines on RDU–FLLthin sample	364	78.8%	65 min	1.10%	B
All carriers on RDU–FLL	1,318	78.0%	72 min	2.20%	B
Delta Air Lines, whole network	1,038,570	81.6%	71 min	1.62%	B

Across the year

DL 1038 quarter by quarter

DL 1038 did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Oct–Dec 2025 at 86.8% on time and its weakest Jul–Sep 2025 at 71.9%, a swing of 15 points on roughly 91 flights a quarter. The twelve-month rate averages over that, so if you are flying in a weak quarter the quarter's own figure is the better guide.

Jul–Sep 202592 flights71.9%
Oct–Dec 202591 flights86.8%
Jan–Mar 202690 flights74.2%
Apr–Jun 202691 flights82.0%

Scale runs 65% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, DL 1038 did best on Tuesday at 84.9% on time and worst on Saturday at 66.0%. Each day rests on about 52 flights, so a gap of 19 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.

Delay causes

Why DL 1038 runs late

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 4,903 reported delay minutes.

National Airspace System
35%
Late-arriving aircraft
31%
Carrier
27%
Extreme weather
7%

35% 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 1,730 minutes out of 4,903, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 4,903 delay minutes reported on DL 1038.

Cancellations sit at 1.10% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.55%.

Connections and routes

What a delay on this flight costs

6.7% 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 an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.

The 680 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.

Every one of the 364 flights under DL 1038 in the data flew RDU to FLL. The number was not reused on any other city pair, which makes this a clean record of one route.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 364 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 DL 1038

For a booking, read DL 1038 as 78.8% on time with 1.10% cancelled over 364 flights. Those are rates from the past twelve months, not a forecast for any particular day.

Where to go next

A flight number here means Delta Air Lines’s own number as it reports to the DOT. How the figures are computed is on the methodology page.

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