Carrier route record

DLPIT→ATL

Delta Air Lines · Pittsburgh to Atlanta

Flights: 2,475
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 89%
Carriers: 2

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Delta Air Lines.

Delta on PIT to ATL 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 a little over an hour. That rests on 2,475 flights, with a median arrival 15 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, Delta's PIT to ATL record is 13 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 131 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

90.7%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,406 completed flights

Avg delay

71 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

2.34%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

90.3%

Every carrier on PIT to ATL, 2,777 flights

These figures cover 2,475 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 15 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 PIT to ATL

Delta flew 2,475 of the 2,777 flights on PIT to ATL, most of the route. Its 90.7% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 90.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 90.7% to Southwest at 86.7%. 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.

On-time performance by carrier on PIT to ATL
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Delta Air Lines (this page)	2,475	90.7%	71 min	2.34%	A
Southwest Airlinesthin sample	302	86.7%	38 min	0.33%	A+

Flight by flight

Delta flight numbers on PIT to ATL

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 2,475 flights.

5am–8am669 flights92.6%
8am–11am342 flights93.4%
11am–2pm604 flights92.0%
2pm–5pm322 flights89.1%
5pm–8pm456 flights86.7%
8pm–5am82 flights83.8%

Scale runs 75% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 93.4% of the time, against 83.8% for the overnight window. That is 10 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 669 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Delta on PIT to ATL through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.September best, December worst

December is the weak month at 81.8% on time, against 95.2% 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. May was the busiest month here, with 225 flights.

Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 94.3% on time and Monday the weakest at 86.0%. 8 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Delta runs late on this route

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 16,000 reported delay minutes.

Carrier
42%
Late-arriving aircraft
34%
National Airspace System
20%
Extreme weather
4%

34% 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 8 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 15,856 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 6,617 of the 16,000 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations sit at 2.34% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.44%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.4% 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 526 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 84.9% on time across 2,475 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 2,475 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 PIT to ATL

Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. September runs 95.2% on time and December 81.8%, a swing of 13 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 2,406 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

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.

Key figures