Flight number record

DL 1303

Delta Air Lines · Detroit to Minneapolis

Route: DTW → MSP
Departs: 19:45
Flights: 348
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s DL 1303, check with Delta Air Lines.

DL 1303 draws a D+. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is an hour and a half behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 348 flights, with a median arrival 1 minute late.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so DL 1303 runs 13 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 130 extra late arrivals.

On time

64.6%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 347 completed flights

Avg delay

92 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.29%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

15.9%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 348 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 15.9% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.

Schedule

When DL 1303 flies

DL 1303 flies DTW to MSP without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 19:45, used on 134 of 348 flights, with 19:55 (125 flights) and 20:46 (36 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 19:45134 flights38.5%
Departs 19:55125 flights35.9%
Departs 20:4636 flights10.3%

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 19:45 departure sits in the 5pm–8pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 68.2%, and DL 1303 runs 4 points worse at 64.6%. 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 1303 next to DTW to MSP

Every carrier on DTW to MSP combined arrived on time 78.7% of the time across 1,927 flights, so DL 1303 is 14 points behind it. Delta flew 1,882 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 78.5% on time. Across its whole network Delta Air Lines managed 81.6%, which this flight trails by 17 points.

DL 1303 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
DL 1303thin sample	348	64.6%	92 min	0.29%	D+
All Delta Air Lines on DTW–MSP	1,882	78.5%	68 min	0.64%	B+
All carriers on DTW–MSP	1,927	78.7%	69 min	0.62%	B+
Delta Air Lines, whole network	1,038,570	81.6%	71 min	1.62%	B

Across the year

DL 1303 quarter by quarter

DL 1303 did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Apr–Jun 2026 at 78.0% on time and its weakest Jul–Sep 2025 at 41.3%, a swing of 37 points on roughly 87 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 flights41.3%
Oct–Dec 202579 flights69.6%
Jan–Mar 202686 flights70.6%
Apr–Jun 202691 flights78.0%

Scale runs 35% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, DL 1303 did best on Tuesday at 72.5% on time and worst on Wednesday at 60.0%. Each day rests on about 50 flights, so a gap of 13 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.

Delay causes

Why DL 1303 runs late

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 54% of the 11,000 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
54%
Late-arriving aircraft
29%
National Airspace System
13%
Extreme weather
4%

The largest share of delay minutes, 54%, 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 6,105 of the 11,000 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 11,346 delay minutes reported on DL 1303.

Cancellations are rare at 0.29%, 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

For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 15.9% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.

The 528 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 CLE to ATL (12) and ATL to CLE (12), but none flew often enough under DL 1303 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to DTW to MSP only.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 348 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 1303

For a booking, DL 1303 is a flight to put a long connection behind. 15.9% of its completed flights arrived an hour or more late, which a short layover will not absorb. If the onward flight is on a separate ticket, the risk sits with you.

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