Carrier route record
DLDEN→DTW
Delta Air Lines · Denver to Detroit
- Flights
- 1,252
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 41%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Delta Air Lines.
Delta on DEN to DTW 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 a little over an hour. That rests on 1,252 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Frontier Airlines, flew 459 at 80.3% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Delta's DEN to DTW record is 9 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 86 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
86.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,243 completed flights
Avg delay
75 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.48%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
77.6%
Every carrier on DEN to DTW, 3,088 flights
These figures cover 1,252 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 10 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 DEN to DTW
Delta flew 1,252 of the 3,088 flights on DEN to DTW, about 41% of it. Its 86.2% on time is 9 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 77.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 100.0% to Southwest at 56.7%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Frontier Airlines arrives on time 80.3% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 56.7%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 649 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 1 | 100.0% | — | 0.00% | A+ |
| Delta Air Lines (this page) | 1,252 | 86.2% | 75 min | 0.48% | A+ |
| Frontier Airlines | 459 | 80.3% | 76 min | 0.22% | B+ |
| United Airlines | 727 | 79.7% | 60 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 649 | 56.7% | 49 min | 1.08% | D |
The spread between Frontier and Southwest is 24 points, wide enough that it should decide the booking. On a hundred trips that is 24 more arrivals inside the on-time window.
Flight by flight
Delta flight numbers on DEN to DTW
Departure window
When Delta runs best on this route
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 1,252 flights.
- 5am–8am365 flights89.5%
- 8am–11am365 flights82.8%
- 11am–2pm1 flights—
- 2pm–5pm363 flights83.7%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am158 flights92.4%
Scale runs 75% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is the strongest at 92.4% on time. The full set of windows spans 10 points.
Across the year
Delta on DEN to DTW through the year
December is the weak month at 75.0% on time, against 93.3% in November. 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. April was the busiest month here, with 116 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 88.7% on time and Thursday the weakest at 83.1%. 6 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 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.
- 44%Carrier
- 41%Late-arriving aircraft
- 10%National Airspace System
- 5%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 13,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 8 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 12,822 reported delay minutes.
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 5,585 of the 13,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.48%, 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 stage length
What a delay here costs
5.1% 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 a little over an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
The 1,123 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 78.6% on time across 1,253 flights, 8 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 8 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,252 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 DEN to DTW
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. November runs 93.3% on time and December 75.0%, a swing of 18 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 1,243 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DEN to DTW, every carrier
- Delta on DTW to DEN, the return leg
- Frontier Airlines on DEN to DTW80.3%
- United Airlines on DEN to DTW79.7%
- Southwest Airlines on DEN to DTW56.7%
- Delta Air Lines network-wide record
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County (DTW) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
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.