Carrier route record

DLGEG→SEA

Delta Air Lines · Spokane to Seattle

Flights: 343
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 7%
Carriers: 3

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

Delta on GEG to SEA earns an A. Nearly every flight arrives inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 16 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about 2.4 hours. That rests on 343 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, SkyWest Airlines, flew 3,020 at 88.2% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Delta's GEG to SEA record is 16 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 162 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

93.8%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 338 completed flights

Avg delay

145 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.46%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

85.9%

Every carrier on GEG to SEA, 5,183 flights

These figures cover 343 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 16 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 GEG to SEA

Delta flew 343 of the 5,183 flights on GEG to SEA, about 7% of it. Its 93.8% on time is 8 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 85.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 93.8% to Alaska at 80.6%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. SkyWest Airlines arrives on time 88.2% of the time; Alaska Airlines manages 80.6%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,820 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on GEG to SEA
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Delta Air Lines (this page)thin sample	343	93.8%	145 min	1.46%	A
SkyWest Airlines	3,020	88.2%	60 min	0.99%	A+
Alaska Airlines	1,820	80.6%	43 min	1.10%	B

SkyWest leads Alaska by 8 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.

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 343 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Delta's GEG to SEA record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 93.8% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Delta on GEG to SEA through the year

Jul–Sep 202592 flights94.5%
Oct–Dec 202586 flights94.0%
Jan–Mar 202674 flights90.4%
Apr–Jun 202691 flights95.6%

Scale runs 80% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 93.8% on time across 343 flights.

Quarter by quarter Delta on GEG to SEA held fairly steady: 94.5% in Jul–Sep 2025, 94.0% in Oct–Dec 2025, 90.4% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 95.6% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 5 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.

Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 97.8% on time and Friday the weakest at 91.7%. 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 70% of the 3,042 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
70%
Late-arriving aircraft
18%
National Airspace System
8%
Extreme weather
3%

The largest share of delay minutes, 70%, 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 2,142 of the 3,042 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 3,042 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations sit at 1.46% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.3% 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.

At 224 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 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 72.7% on time across 343 flights, 21 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 21 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 343 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 Delta on GEG to SEA

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 343 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 93.8% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 338 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