Flight number record

DL 420

Delta Air Lines · Los Angeles to Dallas-Fort Worth

Route: LAX → DFW
Departs: 18:59
Flights: 358
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s DL 420, check with Delta Air Lines.

DL 420 lands a B, 3 points 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 a little over an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 358 flights, with a median arrival 8 minutes early.

On time

80.7%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 352 completed flights

Avg delay

78 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.68%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

7.4%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 358 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 8 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 420 flies

DL 420 flies LAX to DFW without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 18:59, used on 79 of 358 flights, with 18:35 (75 flights) and 18:55 (72 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 18:5979 flights22.1%
Departs 18:3575 flights20.9%
Departs 18:5572 flights20.1%

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 18:59 departure sits in the 5pm–8pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 68.2%, and DL 420 runs 13 points better at 80.7%. 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 420 next to LAX to DFW

Every carrier on LAX to DFW combined arrived on time 74.2% of the time across 6,231 flights, so DL 420 is 7 points ahead of it. Delta flew 718 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 83.6% on time. Across its whole network Delta Air Lines managed 81.6%, close to this flight's figure.

DL 420 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
DL 420thin sample	358	80.7%	78 min	1.68%	B
All Delta Air Lines on LAX–DFW	718	83.6%	80 min	1.81%	B
All carriers on LAX–DFW	6,231	74.2%	90 min	2.44%	C
Delta Air Lines, whole network	1,038,570	81.6%	71 min	1.62%	B

Across the year

DL 420 quarter by quarter

Quarter by quarter DL 420 held fairly steady: 81.3% in Jul–Sep 2025, 81.5% in Oct–Dec 2025, 80.8% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 79.1% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 2 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.

Jul–Sep 202592 flights81.3%
Oct–Dec 202592 flights81.5%
Jan–Mar 202683 flights80.8%
Apr–Jun 202691 flights79.1%

Scale runs 70% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, DL 420 did best on Friday at 85.7% on time and worst on Sunday at 71.4%. Each day rests on about 51 flights, so a gap of 14 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.

Delay causes

Why DL 420 runs late

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 46% of the 5,276 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
46%
Late-arriving aircraft
43%
National Airspace System
11%
Extreme weather
1%

43% 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 5,276 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 43 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 5,276 delay minutes reported on DL 420.

Cancellations sit at 1.68% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.

Connections and routes

What a delay on this flight costs

7.4% 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 a little over an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.

The 1,235 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 358 flights under DL 420 in the data flew LAX to DFW. 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. 358 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 420

For a booking, read DL 420 as 80.7% on time with 1.68% cancelled over 358 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