Route reliability record
MOT→MSP
Minot to Minneapolis
- Flights
- 1,346
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Distance
- 449 mi
- Carriers
- 1
This route lands a B, 4 points better than the national rate of 77.3%. About one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by close to two hours on average. That rests on 1,346 MOT to MSP flights, with a median arrival 11 minutes early.
Best time to fly MOT to MSP: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Sunday. Flights in that window arrived on time 82.2% of the time and Sunday flights 85.7%, against 81.4% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 4 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 41 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
81.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,316 completed flights
Avg delay
108 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.01%
National rate is 1.89%
Best carrier
SkyWest
81.4% on time across 1,346 flights
These figures cover 1,346 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 8.4% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on MOT to MSP
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines | 1,346 | 81.4% | 108 min | 2.01% | B |
Flight by flight
Flights on MOT to MSP
The flight numbers below flew this route at least 250 times in the period, busiest first. Each has its own record, with its schedule and delay causes.
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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 1,346 flights.
- 5am–8am609 flights82.2%
- 8am–11am73 flights80.6%
- 11am–2pm338 flights81.7%
- 2pm–5pm—
- 5pm–8pm326 flights79.7%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 70% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The time of day barely matters here. The 5am–8am window tops the set at 82.2% and 5pm–8pm sits at 79.7%, 3 points apart across 1,346 flights. Pick the departure that suits the trip: whatever is going wrong here is not accumulating over the course of the day. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 609 flights scheduled in it.
Explore
Filter MOT to MSP by airline, time, month and day
Pick a breakdown and a carrier. The dashed mark on each row is the same slice for every US flight.
On MOT to MSP, the best departure window is 5am–8am at 82.2% on time and the worst is 5pm–8pm at 79.7%, a narrow gap of 2.5 points. All US flights leaving 5am–8am ran 89.3%.
- 5–8am82.2%
- 8–11am80.6%
- 11am–2pm81.7%
- 2–5pm—
- 5–8pm79.7%
- 8pm–5am—
best all US flightsScale 60% to 95%. Cells under 30 flights show a dash.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 34 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 60.9% on time, against 95.0% in October. 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 124 flights.
Across the week, Sunday is the strongest day at 85.7% on time and Monday the weakest at 74.0%, a spread of 12 points.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
Carrier accounts for 78% of the 26,000 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 78%Carrier
- 17%Extreme weather
- 5%National Airspace System
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 17% of delay minutes, well above the single-digit share typical across the system. Weather delays are lumpy: they arrive as whole bad days rather than as a steady drag, so the monthly strip above is the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 2.8 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 26,350 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 78%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 21,000 of the 26,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations sit at 2.01% against a national 1.89%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.22%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
8.4% 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 449 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 runs 78.5% on time across 1,347 flights, within 3 points of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
The sample behind these figures is 1,346 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in MSP after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. October runs 95.0% on time and December 60.9%, a swing of 34 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 1,316 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
MOT to MSP questions
How often is MOT to MSP delayed?
About one flight in five arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 18.6% of the 1,346 flights in this analysis, against 22.7% nationally. Delayed flights are late by close to two hours on average.
How reliable is MOT to MSP compared with the rest of the country?
81.4% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.3%, a difference of 4 points in its favour. That is worth a B on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on MOT to MSP?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 82.2% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 79.7%, 3 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 MOT to MSP?
December is the weakest month at 60.9% on time, compared with 95.0% in October. Across the year that is 34 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
- MSP to MOT — the return legseparate record
- Minneapolis-St Paul International (MSP) delay statistics
- MOT to DEN, a related route80.0%
- ORD to MSP, a related route69.9%
- DEN to MSP, a related route78.5%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record81.4%
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
- Connecting flights: how much buffer the data says you need
Direction matters. MOT to MSP and MSP to MOT are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.