DL1318

DL1318 arrived on time 92.8% of the time, against 88.2% for all LAX → SLC flights, so this departure is 4.6 percentage points better than the route as a whole. Against Delta Air Lines’ own flights on this route it is 3.1 points better.

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics · 782 operations, June 2024 – July 2026 · If DL1318 is cancelled or significantly changed, DOT’s automatic refund rule may entitle you to your money back. The refund checker walks through eligibility.

This flight stays close to typical even on its worst days, a smaller gap than 96% of 11,788 comparable flight numbers.

A typical arrival is 12 min early, and the worst tenth are only 18 minutes worse than that.

Source: FlyerIntel analysis of US DOT BTS data · June 2024 – July 2026 · The one thing about this specific departure that ranks most extreme against every other published flight number, out of everything FlyerIntel checks — shown only when something clears a real statistical bar, not for every flight.

Source: FlyerIntel analysis of US DOT BTS data · June 2024 – July 2026

Share of the delay minutes US DOT attributed to each cause for DL1318 on LAX → SLC. Only delays of 15 minutes or more are attributed.

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics · Data covering June 2024 – July 2026

DL1318 is usually the aircraft’s first flight of the day: the schedule gives it a median of 8.4 hours on the ground at LAX, so its “inbound” is mostly the aircraft’s arrival the evening before.

The aircraft flying DL1318 came in 15 or more minutes late on 13% of the departures where its previous flight is known. There are not enough departures in both groups to say how the flight left after a late one and after an on-time one.

Each departure is matched to the flight the same aircraft flew into LAX just before it, using the tail number in the DOT file, 615 of 777 departures in all. A departure is left out when that flight is unknown, was cancelled or diverted, or the aircraft had sat for more than 12 hours. A flight the airline cancelled never left and is not in the count, and one flown by a substitute aircraft is matched to the aircraft that flew it, not to the one first planned.

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics · Data covering June 2024 – July 2026

DL1318 pushes back an average of 2.5 minutes late and reaches the gate at SLC an average of 5.1 minutes early. The 7.6 minutes between those two figures are slack the published schedule already carries, which is why a late pushback on this flight does not reliably become a late arrival. It spends 15.9 minutes on the taxiways at LAX, 1.7 minutes shorter than a typical LAX departure in the same hour.

On arrival at SLC, DL1318 spends 7.9 min taxiing from touchdown to the gate — ground time a connecting passenger sits through before they can even leave the aircraft, on top of however late the flight itself ran. That is about what any arrival at SLC spends on the ground before reaching the gate.

Departure delay is averaged over every pushback and arrival delay over every completed arrival, so the two counts differ by the flights that never reached SLC. Taxi-out is gate to wheels up and sits inside the scheduled block rather than on top of it; the comparison is 36,629 departures from LAX scheduled in the clock hour DL1318 most often leaves in. Taxi-in is landing to gate, compared against every arrival FlyerIntel has on file at SLC (355,118 flights), not just DL1318’s own. More on taxi time.

Source: FlyerIntel analysis of US DOT BTS data · June 2024 – July 2026

DL1318 is scheduled out of LAX at 7:00 AM, in the 7 AM–8 AM bank. Departures from LAX in that hour arrive on time 89.0% of the time against 81.4% across the airport’s whole day — the slot alone is worth 7.6 points better before anything about this particular flight is considered.

The two airport figures cover every departure from LAX to every destination, so they describe the slot rather than this journey — the like-for-like comparison against the route is above. Hours are scheduled local, and a number whose schedule moved between banks inside the period has no single hour and is not described here at all. Why the hour matters.

Source: FlyerIntel analysis of US DOT BTS data · June 2024 – July 2026 · Hours below 120 departures are not scored.

Because the same number has served different journeys, the statistics above describe only the route DL1318 currently operates. Blending them would produce an average of two different flights.

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics · Data covering June 2024 – July 2026

Every departure listed carries at least 600 operations, so the comparison is between figures that mean something. DL1318 is placed in the same ordering rather than left out of it; the rows around it are the most punctual departures on the route, not all of them, so this is a comparison and not a rank. Schedules change; confirm the departure still operates before booking around this.

• DL2906 LAX→SLC Delta Air Lines on the same route, departs 5:45 AM, on time 94.7%
• DL1194 LAX→SLC Delta Air Lines on the same route, departs 11:35 AM, on time 92.3%
• OO5744 LAX→SLC SkyWest Airlines on the same route, departs 6:45 PM, on time 89.1%
• DL2515 SLC→MEM Delta Air Lines flight out of SLC, SLC to MEM, departs 2:05 PM, on time 84.4%