Flight number record

DL 1168

Delta Air Lines · Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta

Route: FLL → ATL
Departs: 05:25
Flights: 337
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s DL 1168, check with Delta Air Lines.

DL 1168 earns an A. Nearly every flight arrives inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 19 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about 3.8 hours. That rests on 337 flights, with a median arrival 14 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, DL 1168's record is 19 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 188 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

96.4%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 330 completed flights

Avg delay

229 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.78%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

1.8%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 337 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 14 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 1168 flies

DL 1168 flies FLL to ATL without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 05:25, used on 98 of 337 flights, with 05:30 (66 flights) and 06:00 (61 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 05:2598 flights29.1%
Departs 05:3066 flights19.6%
Departs 06:0061 flights18.1%

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 05:25 departure sits in the 5am–8am window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 89.3%, and DL 1168 runs 7 points better at 96.4%. Early departures usually start with an aircraft that has not flown yet that day, which is most of why the window does well.

Against the route

DL 1168 next to FLL to ATL

Every carrier on FLL to ATL combined arrived on time 71.8% of the time across 7,185 flights, so DL 1168 is 25 points ahead of it. Delta flew 4,268 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 78.9% on time. Across its whole network Delta Air Lines managed 81.6%, which this flight beats by 15 points.

DL 1168 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
DL 1168thin sample	337	96.4%	229 min	1.78%	A
All Delta Air Lines on FLL–ATL	4,268	78.9%	74 min	1.66%	B
All carriers on FLL–ATL	7,185	71.8%	73 min	2.25%	C
Delta Air Lines, whole network	1,038,570	81.6%	71 min	1.62%	B

Across the year

DL 1168 quarter by quarter

Quarter by quarter DL 1168 held fairly steady: 94.5% in Jul–Sep 2025, 95.4% in Oct–Dec 2025, 96.7% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 98.9% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 4 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.

Jul–Sep 202592 flights94.5%
Oct–Dec 202589 flights95.4%
Jan–Mar 202665 flights96.7%
Apr–Jun 202691 flights98.9%

Scale runs 85% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, DL 1168 ranged from 93.8% on Saturday to 100.0% on Wednesday. With about 48 flights behind each day, a spread of 6 points is inside normal variation, so the day you fly is not worth changing for this flight.

Delay causes

Why DL 1168 runs late

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 98% of the 2,743 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
98%
National Airspace System
2%

The largest share of delay minutes, 98%, 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 2,697 of the 2,743 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 2,743 delay minutes reported on DL 1168.

Cancellations sit at 1.78% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.30%.

Connections and routes

What a delay on this flight costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 1.8% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. Connections built on this flight are about as safe as US domestic connections get, though a cancelled flight still ignores every layover you give it.

The 581 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 same number turns up on two other city pairs in the data, including TLH to ATL (24) and ATL to TLH (24), but none flew often enough under DL 1168 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to FLL to ATL only.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 337 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 1168

For a booking, read DL 1168 as 96.4% on time with 1.78% cancelled over 337 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