Flight number record
UA 2288
United Airlines · Raleigh to Denver
- Route
- RDU → DEN
- Departs
- 16:30
- Flights
- 332
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s UA 2288, check with United Airlines.
UA 2288 lands a B+, about a point better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in five 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 332 flights, with a median arrival 5 minutes early.
Key figures
On time
78.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 328 completed flights
Avg delay
83 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.30%
National rate is 1.81%
1 hour+ late
10.1%
National rate is 8.1%
These figures cover 332 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 10.1% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.
Schedule
When UA 2288 flies
UA 2288 flies RDU to DEN without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 16:30, used on 63 of 332 flights, with 16:22 (41 flights) and 16:28 (37 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.
- Departs 16:3063 flights19.0%
- Departs 16:2241 flights12.3%
- Departs 16:2837 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 16:30 departure sits in the 2pm–5pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 72.4%, and UA 2288 runs 6 points better at 78.4%. Midday slots inherit some of the morning's delays without yet carrying the full weight of the evening's.
Against the route
UA 2288 next to RDU to DEN
Every carrier on RDU to DEN combined arrived on time 80.0% of the time across 1,771 flights, so UA 2288 is 2 points behind it. United flew 776 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 86.3% on time. Across its whole network United Airlines managed 79.0%, close to this flight's figure.
| Compared with | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UA 2288thin sample | 332 | 78.4% | 83 min | 0.30% | B+ |
| All United Airlines on RDU–DEN | 776 | 86.3% | 90 min | 0.64% | A+ |
| All carriers on RDU–DEN | 1,771 | 80.0% | 68 min | 0.85% | B+ |
| United Airlines, whole network | 821,041 | 79.0% | 72 min | 1.01% | B |
Across the year
UA 2288 quarter by quarter
UA 2288 did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Oct–Dec 2025 at 87.9% on time and its weakest Jul–Sep 2025 at 58.4%, a swing of 30 points on roughly 83 flights a quarter. The twelve-month rate averages over that, so if you are flying in a weak quarter the quarter's own figure is the better guide.
- Jul–Sep 202592 flights58.4%
- Oct–Dec 202591 flights87.9%
- Jan–Mar 202687 flights83.7%
- Apr–Jun 202662 flights85.5%
Scale runs 50% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
By weekday, UA 2288 did best on Wednesday at 85.1% on time and worst on Saturday at 72.9%. Each day rests on about 47 flights, so a gap of 12 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.
Delay causes
Why UA 2288 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 5,897 reported delay minutes.
- 41%Late-arriving aircraft
- 40%National Airspace System
- 17%Carrier
- 1%Extreme weather
41% 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 5,897 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 30 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 5,897 delay minutes reported on UA 2288.
Cancellations are rare at 0.30%, 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
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 10.1% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
The 1,436 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 ORD to PHL (17) and IAD to CLE (1), but none flew often enough under UA 2288 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to RDU to DEN only.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 332 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 2288
For a booking, read UA 2288 as 78.4% on time with 0.30% cancelled over 332 flights. Those are rates from the past twelve months, not a forecast for any particular day.
Related
Where to go next
- RDU to DEN, every carrier and departure
- DEN to RDU, the return direction
- Frontier Airlines 2225 on the same route76.2%
- Raleigh-Durham International (RDU) delay statistics
- Denver International (DEN) 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.