Carrier route record
DLTPA→ATL
Delta Air Lines · Tampa to Atlanta
- Flights
- 4,413
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 72%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Delta Air Lines.
Delta on TPA to ATL lands a B, 4 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. Roughly one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by a little over an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 4,413 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Southwest Airlines, flew 732 at 76.9% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Delta's TPA to ATL record is 4 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 41 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
81.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 4,352 completed flights
Avg delay
75 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.22%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
79.9%
Every carrier on TPA to ATL, 6,138 flights
These figures cover 4,413 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 10 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 TPA to ATL
Delta flew 4,413 of the 6,138 flights on TPA to ATL, most of the route. Its 81.7% on time is 2 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 79.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 81.7% to Frontier at 73.5%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 3 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) | 4,413 | 81.7% | 75 min | 1.22% | B |
| Spirit Airlinesthin sample | 126 | 80.2% | 101 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 732 | 76.9% | 59 min | 1.37% | B |
| Frontier Airlines | 867 | 73.5% | 61 min | 1.50% | C |
No carrier stands out. Southwest tops the table at 76.9%, 3 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 TPA to ATL
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 27 points, against 3 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am771 flights92.7%
- 8am–11am688 flights88.8%
- 11am–2pm1,040 flights82.8%
- 2pm–5pm794 flights75.3%
- 5pm–8pm824 flights75.6%
- 8pm–5am296 flights66.2%
Scale runs 60% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 92.7% of the time, against 66.2% for the overnight window. That is 27 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 1,040 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Delta on TPA to ATL through the year
July is the worst month at 66.8% on time, 23 points below April, the best at 89.9%. 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. May was the busiest month here, with 416 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 87.1% on time and Sunday the weakest at 74.6%. 13 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 47% of the 60,000 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.
- 47%Late-arriving aircraft
- 28%Carrier
- 22%National Airspace System
- 3%Extreme weather
47% 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 60,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 15 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 59,745 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 92.7% on time here.
Cancellations sit at 1.22% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.16%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
7.1% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last a little over an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 406 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 74.6% on time across 4,413 flights, 7 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 7 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 4,413 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 TPA to ATL
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. April runs 89.9% on time and July 66.8%, a swing of 23 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of July before you think about anything else. 4,352 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- TPA to ATL, every carrier
- Delta on ATL to TPA, the return leg
- Spirit Airlines on TPA to ATL80.2%
- Southwest Airlines on TPA to ATL76.9%
- Frontier Airlines on TPA to ATL73.5%
- Delta Air Lines network-wide record
- Tampa International (TPA) delay statistics
- Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.