Flight number record
DL 490
Delta Air Lines · Atlanta to New York
- Route
- ATL → LGA
- Departs
- 20:30
- Flights
- 306
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s DL 490, check with Delta Air Lines.
DL 490 draws a D−. Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 306 flights, with a median arrival 2 minutes late.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so DL 490 runs 16 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 161 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
61.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 291 completed flights
Avg delay
75 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.27%
National rate is 1.81%
1 hour+ late
17.2%
National rate is 8.1%
These figures cover 306 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 17.2% 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 490 flies
DL 490 flies ATL to LGA without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 20:30, used on 172 of 306 flights, with 20:00 (107 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.
- Departs 20:30172 flights56.2%
- Departs 20:00107 flights35.0%
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 20:30 departure sits in the 8pm–5am window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 70.5%, and DL 490 runs 9 points worse at 61.5%. 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 490 next to ATL to LGA
Every carrier on ATL to LGA combined arrived on time 73.4% of the time across 8,344 flights, so DL 490 is 12 points behind it. Delta flew 4,936 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 76.7% on time. Across its whole network Delta Air Lines managed 81.6%, which this flight trails by 20 points.
| Compared with | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DL 490thin sample | 306 | 61.5% | 75 min | 3.27% | D− |
| All Delta Air Lines on ATL–LGA | 4,936 | 76.7% | 66 min | 2.96% | B |
| All carriers on ATL–LGA | 8,344 | 73.4% | 75 min | 3.61% | C− |
| Delta Air Lines, whole network | 1,038,570 | 81.6% | 71 min | 1.62% | B |
Across the year
DL 490 quarter by quarter
DL 490 did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jul–Sep 2025 at 66.3% on time and its weakest Oct–Dec 2025 at 54.5%, a swing of 12 points on roughly 77 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 202585 flights66.3%
- Oct–Dec 202571 flights54.5%
- Jan–Mar 202674 flights61.8%
- Apr–Jun 202676 flights62.2%
Scale runs 45% to 70%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
By weekday, DL 490 did best on Tuesday at 69.4% on time and worst on Thursday at 53.1%. Each day rests on about 44 flights, so a gap of 16 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.
Delay causes
Why DL 490 runs late
One category carries most of the weight here. National Airspace System accounts for 44% of the 8,444 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.
- 44%National Airspace System
- 22%Extreme weather
- 21%Carrier
- 14%Late-arriving aircraft
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 22% of delay minutes, well above the single-digit share typical across the system. Weather delays are lumpy: they arrive as whole bad days rather than as a steady drag, so the quarterly figures above are the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 3.5 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 8,444 delay minutes reported on DL 490.
Cancellations run at 3.27%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in 30 cancelled outright. A cancelled flight is invisible in every on-time figure on this page, so the punctuality numbers above describe only the flights that actually operated.
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. 17.2% 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 762 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 three other city pairs in the data, including SNA to SLC (12), MCO to DCA (4) and MSN to DTW (2), but none flew often enough under DL 490 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to ATL to LGA only.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 306 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 490
For a booking, the cancellation rate is the figure to plan around on DL 490: 3.27% of its 306 scheduled flights did not operate. A late arrival costs a little over an hour, but a cancellation costs the day, so leave a later option open.
Related
Where to go next
- ATL to LGA, every carrier and departure
- LGA to ATL, the return direction
- Delta Air Lines 520 on the same route70.4%
- Frontier Airlines 3288 on the same route40.8%
- Delta Air Lines 997 on the same route66.2%
- Delta Air Lines 513 on the same route88.6%
- Delta Air Lines 371 on the same route85.5%
- Delta Air Lines 434 on the same route62.2%
- Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL) delay statistics
- LaGuardia (LGA) delay statistics
- Delta Air Lines on-time record
- Every Delta Air Lines flight number with a record
- The most and least reliable flight numbers in the US
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
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.