Carrier route record
DLMCI→MSP
Delta Air Lines · Kansas City to Minneapolis
- Flights
- 760
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 70%
- Carriers
- 2
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Delta Air Lines.
Delta on MCI to MSP 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 77.3%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs close to two hours. That rests on 760 flights, with a median arrival 14 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, Delta's MCI to MSP record is 9 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 89 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
86.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 749 completed flights
Avg delay
105 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.45%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
83.5%
Every carrier on MCI to MSP, 1,088 flights
These figures cover 760 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. The median arrival is 14 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.
Fare search by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.
Carrier by carrier
Delta against every carrier on MCI to MSP
Delta flew 760 of the 1,088 flights on MCI to MSP, most of the route. Its 86.2% on time is 3 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 83.5%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 86.2% to SkyWest at 77.0%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
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 (this page) | 760 | 86.2% | 105 min | 1.45% | A |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 328 | 77.0% | 83 min | 1.83% | B |
Flight by flight
Delta flight numbers on MCI to MSP
Timetable by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.
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 16 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier.
- 5am–8am365 flights91.0%
- 8am–11am68 flights79.4%
- 11am–2pm85 flights90.6%
- 2pm–5pm126 flights75.4%
- 5pm–8pm116 flights84.3%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 65% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 91.0% of the time, against 75.4% for the afternoon window. That is 16 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 365 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Delta on MCI to MSP through the year
Delays peak in September, when the on-time rate falls to 67.7%. January is the strongest month at 97.0%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 29 points. August was the busiest month here, with 121 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 91.2% on time and Monday the weakest at 79.5%, a spread of 12 points.
Arrival by arrival
How late Delta on MCI to MSP runs when it is late
Delta on MCI to MSP often beats the schedule: 363 of 749 completed flights, 48%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 103 late arrivals split 34 under half an hour, 25 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 44 an hour or more.
- 15+ min early363 flights48.5%
- Within 15 min283 flights37.8%
- 15–29 min late34 flights4.5%
- 30–59 min late25 flights3.3%
- 1–2 hours late25 flights3.3%
- 2+ hours late19 flights2.5%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 749 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
16 of 95 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 17% of them. 24 flights left on time and still arrived late.
The worst days
Worst days for Delta on MCI to MSP
The latest arrival of the period was on 31 July 2026, 17 hours 3 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as carrier-caused (crew, maintenance, fuelling, baggage). The same cause led on four of the five worst days.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 31 July 2026 | 17 hours 3 minutes | Carrier |
| 1 December 2025 | 15 hours 31 minutes | Carrier |
| 2 December 2025 | 13 hours 6 minutes | Carrier |
| 1 September 2025 | 7 hours 52 minutes | Carrier |
| 13 November 2025 | 7 hours 1 minute | Late-arriving aircraft |
Delay causes
Why Delta runs late on this route
Carrier accounts for 54% of the 11,000 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 54%Carrier
- 35%Late-arriving aircraft
- 9%National Airspace System
- 1%Extreme weather
35% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 11,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 35 to one. The split is drawn from 10,792 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 54%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 5,871 of the 11,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations sit at 1.45% against a national 1.89%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
5.9% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.3%, so a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last close to two hours, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 393 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 80.7% on time across 759 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.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 760 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 MCI to MSP
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 760 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 86.2% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 749 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- MCI to MSP, every carrier
- Delta on MSP to MCI, the return leg
- SkyWest Airlines on MCI to MSP77.0%
- Delta Air Lines network-wide record
- Kansas City International (MCI) delay statistics
- Minneapolis-St Paul International (MSP) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.05 million flight records
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.