Route reliability record
HSV→ATL
Huntsville to Atlanta
- Flights
- 2,237
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 151 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route earns a 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 13 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 2,237 flights, with a median arrival 17 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 13 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 125 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
90.1%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,196 completed flights
Avg delay
79 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.83%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
Delta
90.1% on time across 2,230 flights
These figures cover 2,237 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 17 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 HSV 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 | 2,230 | 90.1% | 79 min | 1.84% | A |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 7 | 85.7% | 21 min | 0.00% | 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 2,237 flights.
- 5am–8am719 flights92.9%
- 8am–11am490 flights92.3%
- 11am–2pm331 flights92.1%
- 2pm–5pm357 flights85.5%
- 5pm–8pm340 flights84.0%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 75% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 92.9% of the time, against 84.0% for the evening window. That is 9 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 719 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 13 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
December is the weak month at 83.5% on time, against 96.0% 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 222 flights.
Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 95.0% on time and Sunday the weakest at 88.0%. 7 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
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 17,000 reported delay minutes.
- 42%Carrier
- 37%Late-arriving aircraft
- 13%National Airspace System
- 9%Extreme weather
37% 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 17,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 4 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 17,040 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 7,095 of the 17,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations sit at 1.83% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.0% 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 151 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 84.4% on time across 2,238 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 2,237 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 this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. September runs 96.0% on time and December 83.5%, a swing of 13 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 2,196 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
HSV to ATL questions
How often is HSV to ATL delayed?
About one flight in ten arrive at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 9.9% of the 2,237 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
How reliable is HSV to ATL compared with the rest of the country?
90.1% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 13 points in its favour. That is worth a A on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on HSV to ATL?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 92.9% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 84.0%, 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 December delays on HSV to ATL?
December is the weakest month at 83.5% on time, compared with 96.0% in September. Across the year that is 13 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 HSV — the return legseparate record
- Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL) delay statistics
- Delta Air Lines on-time record90.1%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record85.7%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
Direction matters. HSV to ATL and ATL to HSV are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, July 2025 to June 2026. Updated monthly. How this data is collected.