Carrier route record
DLPDX→LAX
Delta Air Lines · Portland to Los Angeles
- Flights
- 1,689
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 38%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Delta Air Lines.
Delta on PDX to LAX earns an 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 close to two hours. That rests on 1,689 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Alaska Airlines, flew 1,897 at 86.5% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Delta's PDX to LAX record is 13 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 133 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
90.9%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,674 completed flights
Avg delay
108 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.89%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
87.4%
Every carrier on PDX to LAX, 4,403 flights
These figures cover 1,689 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 PDX to LAX
Delta flew 1,689 of the 4,403 flights on PDX to LAX, about 38% of it. Its 90.9% on time is 4 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 87.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 90.9% to SkyWest at 81.0%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 6 points separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delta Air Lines (this page) | 1,689 | 90.9% | 108 min | 0.89% | A+ |
| Alaska Airlines | 1,897 | 86.5% | 49 min | 0.84% | A+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 218 | 84.9% | 52 min | 2.75% | B |
| SkyWest Airlines | 599 | 81.0% | 117 min | 0.33% | B+ |
No carrier stands out. Alaska tops the table at 86.5%, 6 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Flight by flight
Delta flight numbers on PDX to LAX
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 1,689 flights.
- 5am–8am365 flights94.5%
- 8am–11am232 flights90.4%
- 11am–2pm478 flights91.0%
- 2pm–5pm38 flights94.7%
- 5pm–8pm325 flights88.3%
- 8pm–5am251 flights88.8%
Scale runs 80% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The best window here is not the first bank but the 2pm–5pm slot at 94.7% on time, ahead of 5pm–8pm at 88.3%. Where the curve peaks mid-day rather than at dawn, the constraint is usually congestion at one end rather than the aircraft's own rotation. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 478 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Delta on PDX to LAX through the year
August is the worst month at 86.5% on time, 9 points below September, the best at 95.6%. 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 149 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 94.6% on time and Sunday the weakest at 87.2%. 7 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 50% of the 16,000 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.
- 50%Late-arriving aircraft
- 45%Carrier
- 5%National Airspace System
50% 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 16,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 50 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 16,350 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 45%, 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 7,374 of the 16,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.89%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Roughly one flight in 100 is called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.4% 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 833 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 is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 86.2% on time across 1,690 flights, 5 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 5 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,689 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 Delta on PDX to LAX
Put together: Delta's PDX to LAX record is 90.9% on time with 0.89% cancelled, worth an A+. The largest single lever is the 2pm–5pm departure window, and the numbers below the table are where the reasoning behind that lives. 1,674 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- PDX to LAX, every carrier
- Delta on LAX to PDX, the return leg
- Alaska Airlines on PDX to LAX86.5%
- Frontier Airlines on PDX to LAX84.9%
- SkyWest Airlines on PDX to LAX81.0%
- Delta Air Lines network-wide record
- Portland International (PDX) delay statistics
- Los Angeles International (LAX) 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.