Flight number record

DL 953

Delta Air Lines · Seattle to Minneapolis

Route: SEA → MSP
Departs: 23:59
Flights: 262
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s DL 953, check with Delta Air Lines.

DL 953 earns an A+. Close to nine flights in ten arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 14 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs roughly 35 minutes. That rests on 262 flights, with a median arrival 11 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, DL 953's record is 14 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 136 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

91.2%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 260 completed flights

Avg delay

33 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.76%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

1.2%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 262 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 11 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 953 flies

DL 953 flies SEA to MSP without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 23:59, used on 128 of 262 flights, with 23:55 (90 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 23:59128 flights48.9%
Departs 23:5590 flights34.4%

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 23:59 departure sits in the 8pm–5am window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 70.5%, and DL 953 runs 21 points better at 91.2%. 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 953 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 953 is 6 points ahead of 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 10 points.

DL 953 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
DL 953thin sample	262	91.2%	33 min	0.76%	A+
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 953 quarter by quarter

Quarter by quarter DL 953 held fairly steady: 88.0% in Jul–Sep 2025, 95.3% in Oct–Dec 2025 and 87.9% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 7 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.

Jul–Sep 202592 flights88.0%
Oct–Dec 202586 flights95.3%
Jan–Mar 202618 flights—
Apr–Jun 202666 flights87.9%

Scale runs 80% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, DL 953 did best on Wednesday at 100.0% on time and worst on Sunday at 85.7%. Each day rests on about 37 flights, so a gap of 14 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.

Delay causes

Why DL 953 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 768 reported delay minutes.

Late-arriving aircraft
39%
Carrier
29%
National Airspace System
23%
Extreme weather
8%

39% 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 768 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 5 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 768 delay minutes reported on DL 953.

Cancellations are rare at 0.76%, 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

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 1.2% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% 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.

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.

The same number turns up on one other city pair in the data, including ORD to MSP (62), but none flew often enough under DL 953 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to SEA to MSP 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 953

For a booking, DL 953 has one of the better records a US domestic flight can show: 91.2% on time and 0.76% cancelled. That is a base rate, not a promise about any single 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