Flight number record

DL 852

Delta Air Lines · Detroit to Los Angeles

Route: DTW → LAX
Departs: 18:30
Flights: 255
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s DL 852, check with Delta Air Lines.

DL 852 lands a B+, about a point 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 255 flights, with a median arrival 3 minutes early.

On time

78.7%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 253 completed flights

Avg delay

71 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.78%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

7.5%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 255 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 3 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 852 flies

DL 852 flies DTW to LAX without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 18:30, used on 79 of 255 flights, with 18:20 (56 flights) and 18:50 (41 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 18:3079 flights31.0%
Departs 18:2056 flights22.0%
Departs 18:5041 flights16.1%

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 18:30 departure sits in the 5pm–8pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 68.2%, and DL 852 runs 11 points better at 78.7%. 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 852 next to DTW to LAX

Every carrier on DTW to LAX combined arrived on time 77.9% of the time across 2,527 flights, so DL 852 is about level with it. Delta flew 1,979 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 77.3% on time. Across its whole network Delta Air Lines managed 81.6%, which this flight trails by 3 points.

DL 852 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
DL 852thin sample	255	78.7%	71 min	0.78%	B+
All Delta Air Lines on DTW–LAX	1,979	77.3%	59 min	0.76%	B+
All carriers on DTW–LAX	2,527	77.9%	60 min	0.87%	B+
Delta Air Lines, whole network	1,038,570	81.6%	71 min	1.62%	B

Across the year

DL 852 quarter by quarter

Quarter by quarter DL 852 held fairly steady: 75.8% in Jul–Sep 2025, 81.8% in Oct–Dec 2025 and 81.5% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 6 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.

Jul–Sep 202591 flights75.8%
Oct–Dec 202578 flights81.8%
Jan–Mar 202621 flights—
Apr–Jun 202665 flights81.5%

Scale runs 65% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, DL 852 did best on Wednesday at 86.5% on time and worst on Monday at 72.2%. Each day rests on about 36 flights, so a gap of 14 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.

Delay causes

Why DL 852 runs late

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 73% of the 3,853 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
73%
Late-arriving aircraft
14%
National Airspace System
9%
Extreme weather
4%

The largest share of delay minutes, 73%, 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 2,813 of the 3,853 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 3,853 delay minutes reported on DL 852.

Cancellations are rare at 0.78%, 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

7.5% 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.

At 1,979 miles this is transcontinental flying, and long routes get a quiet structural advantage. Scheduled block time on a flight this length carries more padding in absolute minutes, so a twenty-minute late departure often still becomes an on-time arrival. Read the on-time rate here as slightly flattering next to a short-haul route with the same operational quality.

The same number turns up on three other city pairs in the data, including IAH to DTW (62), ATL to DTW (24) and ATL to CLT (16), but none flew often enough under DL 852 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to DTW to LAX only.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 255 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 852

For a booking, read DL 852 as 78.7% on time with 0.78% cancelled over 255 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