Flight number record

DL 1296

Delta Air Lines · Salt Lake City to San Diego

Route: SLC → SAN
Departs: 11:20
Flights: 365
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s DL 1296, check with Delta Air Lines.

DL 1296 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 50 minutes on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 365 flights, with a median arrival 5 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, DL 1296's record is 6 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 60 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

83.6%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 359 completed flights

Avg delay

51 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.64%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

3.3%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 365 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 5 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 1296 flies

DL 1296 flies SLC to SAN without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 11:20, used on 100 of 365 flights, with 11:25 (73 flights) and 11:15 (58 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 11:20100 flights27.4%
Departs 11:2573 flights20.0%
Departs 11:1558 flights15.9%

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 11:20 departure sits in the 11am–2pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 78.8%, and DL 1296 runs 5 points better at 83.6%. Midday slots inherit some of the morning's delays without yet carrying the full weight of the evening's.

Against the route

DL 1296 next to SLC to SAN

Every carrier on SLC to SAN combined arrived on time 83.2% of the time across 2,958 flights, so DL 1296 is about level with it. Delta flew 1,731 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 83.8% on time. Across its whole network Delta Air Lines managed 81.6%, which this flight beats by 2 points.

DL 1296 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
DL 1296	365	83.6%	51 min	1.64%	B
All Delta Air Lines on SLC–SAN	1,731	83.8%	55 min	0.81%	B+
All carriers on SLC–SAN	2,958	83.2%	54 min	0.85%	B+
Delta Air Lines, whole network	1,038,570	81.6%	71 min	1.62%	B

Across the year

DL 1296 quarter by quarter

Quarter by quarter DL 1296 held fairly steady: 85.7% in Jul–Sep 2025, 77.2% in Oct–Dec 2025, 86.4% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 85.2% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 9 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.

Jul–Sep 202592 flights85.7%
Oct–Dec 202592 flights77.2%
Jan–Mar 202690 flights86.4%
Apr–Jun 202691 flights85.2%

Scale runs 70% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, DL 1296 did best on Wednesday at 88.2% on time and worst on Friday at 72.5%. Each day rests on about 52 flights, so a gap of 16 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.

Delay causes

Why DL 1296 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 3,011 reported delay minutes.

National Airspace System
35%
Carrier
33%
Late-arriving aircraft
25%
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 1,052 minutes out of 3,011, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 3,011 delay minutes reported on DL 1296.

Cancellations sit at 1.64% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.

Connections and routes

What a delay on this flight costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.3% 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 626 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 one other city pair in the data, including SAN to SLC (165), but none flew often enough under DL 1296 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to SLC to SAN only.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 365 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 1296

For a booking, read DL 1296 as 83.6% on time with 1.64% cancelled over 365 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