Flight number record

DL 1161

Delta Air Lines · Salt Lake City to Los Angeles

Route: SLC → LAX
Departs: 17:10
Flights: 351
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s DL 1161, check with Delta Air Lines.

DL 1161 lands a B+, 6 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six 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 351 flights, with a median arrival 9 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, DL 1161's record is 6 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 61 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

83.7%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 349 completed flights

Avg delay

57 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.57%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

5.2%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 351 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 9 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 1161 flies

DL 1161 flies SLC to LAX without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 17:10, used on 124 of 351 flights, with 17:15 (70 flights) and 17:45 (47 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 17:10124 flights35.3%
Departs 17:1570 flights19.9%
Departs 17:4547 flights13.4%

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 17:10 departure sits in the 5pm–8pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 68.2%, and DL 1161 runs 16 points better at 83.7%. By that time of day most aircraft have flown several legs already, and whatever went wrong earlier is still in the schedule.

Against the route

DL 1161 next to SLC to LAX

Every carrier on SLC to LAX combined arrived on time 86.2% of the time across 4,146 flights, so DL 1161 is 3 points behind it. Delta flew 2,454 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 85.4% on time. Across its whole network Delta Air Lines managed 81.6%, which this flight beats by 2 points.

DL 1161 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
DL 1161thin sample	351	83.7%	57 min	0.57%	B+
All Delta Air Lines on SLC–LAX	2,454	85.4%	51 min	0.41%	A+
All carriers on SLC–LAX	4,146	86.2%	55 min	0.46%	A+
Delta Air Lines, whole network	1,038,570	81.6%	71 min	1.62%	B

Across the year

DL 1161 quarter by quarter

Quarter by quarter DL 1161 held fairly steady: 84.8% in Jul–Sep 2025, 82.2% in Oct–Dec 2025, 87.6% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 80.2% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 7 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.

Jul–Sep 202579 flights84.8%
Oct–Dec 202592 flights82.2%
Jan–Mar 202689 flights87.6%
Apr–Jun 202691 flights80.2%

Scale runs 70% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, DL 1161 did best on Wednesday at 91.8% on time and worst on Thursday at 78.0%. Each day rests on about 50 flights, so a gap of 14 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.

Delay causes

Why DL 1161 runs late

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 46% of the 3,243 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
46%
Carrier
39%
National Airspace System
8%
Extreme weather
7%

46% 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 3,243 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 7 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 3,243 delay minutes reported on DL 1161.

Cancellations are rare at 0.57%, 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 routes

What a delay on this flight costs

5.2% 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 590 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 351 flights under DL 1161 in the data flew SLC to LAX. 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. 351 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 1161

For a booking, read DL 1161 as 83.7% on time with 0.57% cancelled over 351 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