Flight number record
DL 888
Delta Air Lines · Portland to Atlanta
- Route
- PDX → ATL
- Departs
- 22:10
- Flights
- 262
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s DL 888, check with Delta Air Lines.
DL 888 earns an A+. Nearly every flight arrives inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 17 points better than the national rate of 77.3%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs roughly 45 minutes. That rests on 262 flights, with a median arrival 13 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, DL 888's record is 17 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 173 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
94.6%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 258 completed flights
Avg delay
43 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.76%
National rate is 1.89%
1 hour+ late
1.2%
National rate is 8.3%
These figures cover 262 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. The median arrival is 13 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.
Fare search by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.
Schedule
When DL 888 flies
DL 888 flies PDX to ATL without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 22:10, used on 71 of 262 flights, with 21:45 (51 flights) and 22:05 (47 flights) next.
- Departs 22:1071 flights27.1%
- Departs 21:4551 flights19.5%
- Departs 22:0547 flights17.9%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of scheduled departures at each local time. Times used on fewer than one flight in ten are not listed.
A 22:10 departure sits in the 8pm–5am window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 70.1%, and DL 888 runs 25 points better at 94.6%. By that time of day most aircraft have flown several legs already, and whatever went wrong earlier is still in the schedule.
Timetable by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.
Against the route
DL 888 next to PDX to ATL
Every carrier on PDX to ATL combined arrived on time 88.4% of the time across 1,544 flights, so DL 888 is 6 points ahead of it. Delta flew 1,257 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 90.2% on time. Across its whole network Delta Air Lines managed 81.1%, which this flight beats by 14 points.
| Compared with | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DL 888thin sample | 262 | 94.6% | 43 min | 0.76% | A+ |
| All Delta Air Lines on PDX–ATL | 1,257 | 90.2% | 60 min | 0.95% | A+ |
| All carriers on PDX–ATL | 1,544 | 88.4% | 52 min | 0.91% | A+ |
| Delta Air Lines, whole network | 1,039,517 | 81.1% | 71 min | 1.74% | B |
Across the year
DL 888 quarter by quarter
Quarter by quarter DL 888 held fairly steady: 96.7% in Jul–Sep 2025, 89.7% in Oct–Dec 2025, 98.6% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 95.5% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 9 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.
- Jul–Sep 202530 flights96.7%
- Oct–Dec 202587 flights89.7%
- Jan–Mar 202678 flights98.6%
- Apr–Jun 202667 flights95.5%
Scale runs 80% to 100%.
By weekday, DL 888 ranged from 88.2% on Saturday to 100.0% on Friday. With about 37 flights behind each day, a spread of 12 points is inside normal variation, so the day you fly is not worth changing for this flight.
Arrival by arrival
How late DL 888 runs when it is late
DL 888 often beats the schedule: 118 of 258 completed flights, 46%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 14 late arrivals split 4 under half an hour, 7 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 3 an hour or more. Not one arrived two hours late.
- 15+ min early118 flights45.7%
- Within 15 min126 flights48.8%
- 15–29 min late4 flights1.6%
- 30–59 min late7 flights2.7%
- 1–2 hours late3 flights1.2%
- 2+ hours late0 flights0.0%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 258 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
A late pushback is often recovered here: of 32 departures that left 15 minutes late or more, 18 still arrived on time. No flight that left on time arrived late.
The worst days
Worst days for DL 888
The latest arrival of the period was on 29 December 2025, 1 hour 23 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. The same cause led on three of the five worst days.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 29 December 2025 | 1 hour 23 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 28 December 2025 | 1 hour 18 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 3 January 2026 | 1 hour 13 minutes | Carrier |
| 13 November 2025 | 50 minutes | Carrier |
| 29 November 2025 | 41 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
Delay causes
Why DL 888 runs late
Carrier accounts for 53% of the 607 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 53%Carrier
- 41%Late-arriving aircraft
- 6%National Airspace System
41% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 607 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 41 to one. The split is drawn from 607 delay minutes reported on DL 888.
Cancellations are rare at 0.76%, below the national 1.89% 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
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 1.2% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Connections built on this flight are about as safe as US domestic connections get, though a cancelled flight still ignores every layover you give it.
At 2,172 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 one other city pair in the data, including MCO to BOS (85), but none flew often enough under DL 888 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to PDX to ATL only.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 262 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 888
For a booking, DL 888 has one of the better records a US domestic flight can show: 94.6% on time and 0.76% cancelled. That is a base rate, not a promise about any single day.
Related
Where to go next
- PDX to ATL, every carrier and departure
- ATL to PDX, the return direction
- Delta Air Lines 662 on the same route94.9%
- Delta Air Lines 539 on the same route86.3%
- Alaska Airlines 784 on the same route79.7%
- Portland International (PDX) delay statistics
- Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL) 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
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
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, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.