Carrier route record
DLMSY→DTW
Delta Air Lines · New Orleans to Detroit
- Flights
- 628
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 76%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Delta Air Lines.
Delta on MSY 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 8 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 628 flights, with a median arrival 7 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, Delta's MSY to DTW record is 8 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 78 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
85.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 615 completed flights
Avg delay
60 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.59%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
83.7%
Every carrier on MSY to DTW, 827 flights
These figures cover 628 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 7 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 MSY to DTW
Delta flew 628 of the 827 flights on MSY to DTW, most of the route. Its 85.4% on time is 2 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 83.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 85.4% to Frontier at 72.7%. Two 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) | 628 | 85.4% | 60 min | 1.59% | A |
| Spirit Airlinesthin sample | 176 | 79.4% | 99 min | 0.57% | B+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 23 | 72.7% | 64 min | 4.35% | C− |
Flight by flight
Delta flight numbers on MSY 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 628 flights.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am3 flights—
- 11am–2pm359 flights85.0%
- 2pm–5pm36 flights88.6%
- 5pm–8pm230 flights85.2%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 75% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 2pm–5pm window is the strongest at 88.6% on time. The full set of windows spans 4 points.
Across the year
Delta on MSY to DTW through the year
June is the worst month at 78.8% on time, 15 points below September, the best at 93.3%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. March was the busiest month here, with 62 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 93.8% on time and Sunday the weakest at 76.4%. 17 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. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 56% of the 5,423 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.
- 56%Late-arriving aircraft
- 31%Carrier
- 13%National Airspace System
- 0%Extreme weather
56% 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 5,423 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 56 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 5,423 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations sit at 1.59% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.48%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.1% 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.
The 926 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 runs 85.0% on time across 628 flights, within half a point of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 628 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 MSY to DTW
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 628 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 85.4% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 615 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- MSY to DTW, every carrier
- Delta on DTW to MSY, the return leg
- Spirit Airlines on MSY to DTW79.4%
- Delta Air Lines network-wide record
- Louis Armstrong New Orleans International (MSY) delay statistics
- Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County (DTW) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
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.