Flight number record

UA 1978

United Airlines · Denver to Cincinnati

Route: DEN → CVG
Departs: 09:40
Flights: 343
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s UA 1978, check with United Airlines.

UA 1978 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 15 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 343 flights, with a median arrival 11 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, UA 1978's record is 15 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 151 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

92.7%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 341 completed flights

Avg delay

64 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.58%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

2.3%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 343 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 UA 1978 flies

UA 1978 flies DEN to CVG without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 09:40, used on 131 of 343 flights, with 09:45 (123 flights) and 09:35 (65 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 09:40131 flights38.2%
Departs 09:45123 flights35.9%
Departs 09:3565 flights19.0%

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 09:40 departure sits in the 8am–11am window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 84.1%, and UA 1978 runs 9 points better at 92.7%. Early departures usually start with an aircraft that has not flown yet that day, which is most of why the window does well.

Against the route

UA 1978 next to DEN to CVG

Every carrier on DEN to CVG combined arrived on time 77.6% of the time across 1,520 flights, so UA 1978 is 15 points ahead of it. United flew 728 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 82.7% on time. Across its whole network United Airlines managed 79.0%, which this flight beats by 14 points.

UA 1978 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
UA 1978thin sample	343	92.7%	64 min	0.58%	A+
All United Airlines on DEN–CVG	728	82.7%	54 min	0.55%	B+
All carriers on DEN–CVG	1,520	77.6%	57 min	0.86%	B+
United Airlines, whole network	821,041	79.0%	72 min	1.01%	B

Across the year

UA 1978 quarter by quarter

Quarter by quarter UA 1978 held fairly steady: 87.9% in Jul–Sep 2025, 95.6% in Oct–Dec 2025, 92.6% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 94.5% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 8 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.

Jul–Sep 202592 flights87.9%
Oct–Dec 202591 flights95.6%
Jan–Mar 202669 flights92.6%
Apr–Jun 202691 flights94.5%

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

By weekday, UA 1978 ranged from 87.8% on Wednesday to 95.9% on Thursday. With about 49 flights behind each day, a spread of 8 points is inside normal variation, so the day you fly is not worth changing for this flight.

Delay causes

Why UA 1978 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 1,611 reported delay minutes.

Carrier
41%
Late-arriving aircraft
39%
National Airspace System
20%

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 1,611 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 39 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 1,611 delay minutes reported on UA 1978.

Cancellations are rare at 0.58%, 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 2.3% 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 1,069 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 two other city pairs in the data, including JAC to DEN (184) and MSO to DEN (18), but none flew often enough under UA 1978 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to DEN to CVG only.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 343 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 UA 1978

For a booking, UA 1978 has one of the better records a US domestic flight can show: 92.7% on time and 0.58% cancelled. That is a base rate, not a promise about any single day.

Where to go next

A flight number here means United Airlines’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