Carrier route record

DLCLE→ATL

Delta Air Lines · Cleveland to Atlanta

Flights: 2,693
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 79%
Carriers: 2

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

Delta on CLE to ATL 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 12 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 2,693 flights, with a median arrival 15 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, Delta's CLE to ATL record is 12 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 117 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

89.3%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,634 completed flights

Avg delay

74 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.93%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

85.4%

Every carrier on CLE to ATL, 3,407 flights

These figures cover 2,693 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 15 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

Delta against every carrier on CLE to ATL

Delta flew 2,693 of the 3,407 flights on CLE to ATL, most of the route. Its 89.3% on time is 4 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 85.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 89.3% to Frontier at 70.6%.

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.

On-time performance by carrier on CLE to ATL
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Delta Air Lines (this page)	2,693	89.3%	74 min	1.93%	A
Frontier Airlines	714	70.6%	78 min	2.52%	C

Flight by flight

Delta flight numbers on CLE to ATL

Departure window

When Delta runs best on this route

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 26 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am683 flights91.8%
8am–11am484 flights92.6%
11am–2pm433 flights89.6%
2pm–5pm511 flights88.9%
5pm–8pm540 flights85.2%
8pm–5am42 flights66.7%

Scale runs 60% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 92.6% of the time, against 66.7% for the overnight window. That is 26 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 683 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Delta on CLE to ATL through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.September best, December worst

December is the weak month at 80.9% on time, against 94.5% in September. Winter delays cluster: a single storm system can account for most of a month's shortfall, so an average December hides both very good weeks and genuinely unflyable days. July was the busiest month here, with 255 flights.

Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 93.3% on time and Sunday the weakest at 85.7%. 8 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Delta runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 44% of the 21,000 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.

Carrier
44%
Late-arriving aircraft
30%
National Airspace System
16%
Extreme weather
10%

The largest share of delay minutes, 44%, 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 9,130 of the 21,000 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 20,859 reported delay minutes.

The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 92.6% on time here.

Cancellations sit at 1.93% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.26%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.8% 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 554 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 return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 83.5% on time across 2,693 flights, 6 points below this direction. Departure banks, aircraft rotations and the congestion at each end all differ, so scoring the two directions together would average away a real 6 points of difference.

The sample behind these figures is 2,693 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.

What to do with this

Booking Delta on CLE to ATL

Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. September runs 94.5% on time and December 80.9%, a swing of 14 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 2,634 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

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