Flight number record
UA 2159
United Airlines · Denver to Kansas City
- Route
- DEN → MCI
- Departs
- 09:55
- Flights
- 341
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s UA 2159, check with United Airlines.
UA 2159 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 10 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about 50 minutes. That rests on 341 flights, with a median arrival 6 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, UA 2159's record is 10 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 103 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
87.9%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 340 completed flights
Avg delay
51 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.29%
National rate is 1.81%
1 hour+ late
2.4%
National rate is 8.1%
These figures cover 341 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 6 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 2159 flies
UA 2159 flies DEN to MCI without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 09:55, used on 72 of 341 flights, with 09:52 (49 flights) and 10:00 (41 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.
- Departs 09:5572 flights21.1%
- Departs 09:5249 flights14.4%
- Departs 10:0041 flights12.0%
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 09:55 departure sits in the 8am–11am window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 84.1%, and UA 2159 runs 4 points better at 87.9%. 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 2159 next to DEN to MCI
Every carrier on DEN to MCI combined arrived on time 75.5% of the time across 4,269 flights, so UA 2159 is 12 points ahead of it. United flew 1,297 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 78.2% on time. Across its whole network United Airlines managed 79.0%, which this flight beats by 9 points.
| Compared with | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UA 2159thin sample | 341 | 87.9% | 51 min | 0.29% | A+ |
| All United Airlines on DEN–MCI | 1,297 | 78.2% | 66 min | 0.39% | B+ |
| All carriers on DEN–MCI | 4,269 | 75.5% | 60 min | 0.40% | B+ |
| United Airlines, whole network | 821,041 | 79.0% | 72 min | 1.01% | B |
Across the year
UA 2159 quarter by quarter
Quarter by quarter UA 2159 held fairly steady: 92.4% in Jul–Sep 2025, 85.9% in Oct–Dec 2025, 85.0% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 87.8% 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 flights92.4%
- Oct–Dec 202578 flights85.9%
- Jan–Mar 202680 flights85.0%
- Apr–Jun 202691 flights87.8%
Scale runs 75% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
By weekday, UA 2159 ranged from 82.4% on Tuesday to 93.9% on Wednesday. With about 49 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.
Delay causes
Why UA 2159 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 2,078 reported delay minutes.
- 37%Carrier
- 34%Late-arriving aircraft
- 27%National Airspace System
- 1%Extreme weather
34% 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 2,078 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 32 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 2,078 delay minutes reported on UA 2159.
Cancellations are rare at 0.29%, 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 2.4% 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 533 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 three other city pairs in the data, including MCI to IAH (20), LAX to IAD (19) and DEN to GSP (4), but none flew often enough under UA 2159 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to DEN to MCI only.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 341 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 2159
For a booking, UA 2159 has one of the better records a US domestic flight can show: 87.9% on time and 0.29% cancelled. That is a base rate, not a promise about any single day.
Related
Where to go next
- DEN to MCI, every carrier and departure
- MCI to DEN, the return direction
- United Airlines 586 on the same route86.0%
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- Kansas City International (MCI) delay statistics
- United Airlines on-time record
- Every United Airlines 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 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.