Flight number record

DL 949

Delta Air Lines · Seattle to Minneapolis

Route: SEA → MSP
Departs: 15:35
Flights: 316
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s DL 949, check with Delta Air Lines.

DL 949 lands a B, 6 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by an hour and a half on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 316 flights, with a median arrival 8 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, DL 949's record is 6 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 56 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

83.2%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 309 completed flights

Avg delay

87 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.58%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

6.5%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 316 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 949 flies

DL 949 flies SEA to MSP without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 15:35, used on 62 of 316 flights, with 15:30 (60 flights) and 19:30 (35 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 15:3562 flights19.6%
Departs 15:3060 flights19.0%
Departs 19:3035 flights11.1%

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 15:35 departure sits in the 2pm–5pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 72.4%, and DL 949 runs 11 points better at 83.2%. Midday slots inherit some of the morning's delays without yet carrying the full weight of the evening's.

Against the route

DL 949 next to SEA to MSP

Every carrier on SEA to MSP combined arrived on time 85.5% of the time across 2,689 flights, so DL 949 is 2 points behind it. Delta flew 1,736 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 88.5% on time. Across its whole network Delta Air Lines managed 81.6%, which this flight beats by 2 points.

DL 949 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
DL 949thin sample	316	83.2%	87 min	1.58%	B
All Delta Air Lines on SEA–MSP	1,736	88.5%	66 min	0.81%	A+
All carriers on SEA–MSP	2,689	85.5%	55 min	0.89%	A+
Delta Air Lines, whole network	1,038,570	81.6%	71 min	1.62%	B

Across the year

DL 949 quarter by quarter

Quarter by quarter DL 949 held fairly steady: 86.4% in Jul–Sep 2025, 77.0% in Oct–Dec 2025, 86.2% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 82.9% 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 202566 flights86.4%
Oct–Dec 202577 flights77.0%
Jan–Mar 202690 flights86.2%
Apr–Jun 202683 flights82.9%

Scale runs 70% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, DL 949 did best on Thursday at 89.6% on time and worst on Sunday at 68.1%. Each day rests on about 45 flights, so a gap of 22 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.

Delay causes

Why DL 949 runs late

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 55% of the 4,530 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
55%
Late-arriving aircraft
25%
Extreme weather
11%
National Airspace System
9%

Extreme weather accounts for 11% 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 1.8 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 4,530 delay minutes reported on DL 949.

Cancellations sit at 1.58% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.63%.

Connections and routes

What a delay on this flight costs

6.5% 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 an hour and a half, which a normal layover absorbs.

The 1,399 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 316 flights under DL 949 in the data flew SEA to MSP. 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. 316 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 949

For a booking, read DL 949 as 83.2% on time with 1.58% cancelled over 316 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