Route reliability record
BTR→ATL
Baton Rouge to Atlanta
- Flights
- 1,058
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 448 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route earns an A. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 9 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs an hour and a half. That rests on 1,058 BTR to ATL flights, with a median arrival 12 minutes early.
Best time to fly BTR to ATL: a 8am–11am departure, ideally on a Wednesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 90.6% of the time and Wednesday flights 90.3%, against 86.8% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 9 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 92 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
86.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,033 completed flights
Avg delay
99 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.27%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
Delta
86.9% on time across 1,008 flights
These figures cover 1,058 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 12 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.
Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on BTR to ATL
Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delta Air Lines | 1,008 | 86.9% | 100 min | 1.79% | A |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 50 | 86.4% | 60 min | 12.00% | A− |
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time is the single lever a traveller controls, and it moves the odds more than most people expect. Each bar below is the on-time rate for flights scheduled to leave inside that window, across 1,058 flights.
- 5am–8am403 flights90.4%
- 8am–11am135 flights90.6%
- 11am–2pm171 flights82.0%
- 2pm–5pm268 flights82.0%
- 5pm–8pm81 flights88.9%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 75% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 82.0% on time against 90.6% for 8am–11am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 403 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
Twelve months, one bar each, drawn from the same 1,058 flights. The strip shows how much of this route's record is set by the calendar rather than by the operation.
April is the best month on the calendar at 93.6% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. December was the busiest month here, with 125 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 90.3% on time and Monday the weakest at 80.7%. 10 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 42% of the 13,000 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.
- 42%Carrier
- 31%Late-arriving aircraft
- 14%Extreme weather
- 13%National Airspace System
Extreme weather accounts for 14% 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 monthly strip above is the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 2.3 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 13,408 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 42%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 5,639 of the 13,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations sit at 2.27% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.09%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
6.2% 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.
At 448 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 8am–11am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg runs 84.2% on time across 1,058 flights, within 3 points of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 1,058 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in ATL after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 1,058 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 86.8% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 1,033 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
BTR to ATL questions
How often is BTR to ATL delayed?
About one flight in eight arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 13.2% of the 1,058 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by an hour and a half on average.
How reliable is BTR to ATL compared with the rest of the country?
86.8% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 9 points in its favour. That is worth a A on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on BTR to ATL?
The 8am–11am departure window is the strongest at 90.6% on time. The 2pm–5pm window is the weakest at 82.0%, 9 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are October delays on BTR to ATL?
October is the weakest month at 82.4% on time, compared with 93.6% in April. Across the year that is 11 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- ATL to BTR — the return legseparate record
- Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL) delay statistics
- BTR to DFW, a related route77.8%
- LGA to ATL, a related route76.6%
- BTR to CLT, a related route82.2%
- Delta Air Lines on-time record86.9%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record86.4%
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
Direction matters. BTR to ATL and ATL to BTR are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.