Flight number record

DL 860

Delta Air Lines · New York to Dallas-Fort Worth

Route: LGA → DFW
Departs: 20:30
Flights: 266
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s DL 860, check with Delta Air Lines.

DL 860 draws a D−. Roughly 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 266 flights, with a median arrival 1 minute late.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so DL 860 runs 17 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 175 extra late arrivals.

On time

60.1%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 248 completed flights

Avg delay

83 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

6.39%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

20.2%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 266 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 20.2% 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 860 flies

DL 860 flies LGA to DFW without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 20:30, used on 44 of 266 flights, with 20:55 (34 flights) and 19:00 (33 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 20:3044 flights16.5%
Departs 20:5534 flights12.8%
Departs 19:0033 flights12.4%

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 860 runs 10 points worse at 60.1%. 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 860 next to LGA to DFW

Every carrier on LGA to DFW combined arrived on time 70.8% of the time across 6,782 flights, so DL 860 is 11 points behind it. Delta flew 1,955 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 71.0% on time. Across its whole network Delta Air Lines managed 81.6%, which this flight trails by 21 points.

DL 860 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
DL 860thin sample	266	60.1%	83 min	6.39%	D−
All Delta Air Lines on LGA–DFW	1,955	71.0%	74 min	4.35%	C−
All carriers on LGA–DFW	6,782	70.8%	86 min	4.94%	C−
Delta Air Lines, whole network	1,038,570	81.6%	71 min	1.62%	B

Across the year

DL 860 quarter by quarter

DL 860 did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jul–Sep 2025 at 68.1% on time and its weakest Oct–Dec 2025 at 52.1%, a swing of 16 points on roughly 67 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 202578 flights68.1%
Oct–Dec 202577 flights52.1%
Jan–Mar 202677 flights60.0%
Apr–Jun 202634 flights60.6%

Scale runs 45% to 75%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, DL 860 did best on Tuesday at 72.1% on time and worst on Thursday at 53.8%. Each day rests on about 38 flights, so a gap of 18 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.

Delay causes

Why DL 860 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 8,248 reported delay minutes.

Late-arriving aircraft
35%
Carrier
35%
National Airspace System
30%
Extreme weather
0%

35% 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 8,248 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 35 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 8,248 delay minutes reported on DL 860.

Cancellations run at 6.39%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in fifteen 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. 20.2% 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 1,389 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 four other city pairs in the data, including BOS to SFO (24), SFO to BOS (18) and MSP to PIT (6), but none flew often enough under DL 860 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to LGA to DFW only.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 266 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 860

For a booking, the cancellation rate is the figure to plan around on DL 860: 6.39% of its 266 scheduled flights did not operate. A late arrival costs an hour and a half, but a cancellation costs the day, so leave a later option open.

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