So DL changes your incoming plane which gives you a MX delay too ?
 

Thought I would try DL this week, was getting sick of AA's performance. Flying MSP-CLE the incoming was supposed to be DL5052 which was on time however they decided to switch our incoming to DL3321 which had a MX delay, per the Skyclub people, it does not arrive until we were supposed to take off so probably at least a 30 min delay. Not sure what the bruh haha is about performance I absolutely detest it when AA does that to me, guess it is no better at DL.

EDIT: Well gotta admit DL did a good job, I thought it would be like AA where the 30 mins turns into 45-60-75 etc. but they got us there a couple of ins early.

It is the same on all carriers.

Aircraft are swapped out on a dynamic basis and for many reasons. If you fly enough, you will benefit from this as much as you lose from the practice.

Stats show Delta is better.

https://www.transtats.bts.gov/OT_Del...elayCause1.asp

Couple things to note;
1)DL is far less delayed than AA,
2)DL pads their schedules, so a 30 min departure delay can still very easily arrive on time.
3)This was a regional carrier operated flight. While the plane looks like a DL plane it isn't. While the particular regional carrier you flew doesn't also fly for AA, number of them do, Compass/Slywest being two. The point being a regional carrier flight is no different than flying on OAL. If you were on a KLM operated, DL coded flight you wouldn't blame DL for what happened. Same applies here. A regional carrier operates the same way regardless of who it's actually flying on behalf of.

Based on OP's info it seems likely we are talking about

https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n929xj

if so then it shows DL5041 MSP-CLE departing 36 minutes late and estimated to arrive two minutes early :rolleyes:

I bet the people on the flight that "stole" the inbound are happier too; if I've followed the tail/flights correctly they were able to depart MSP after merely a ~1 hour delay instead of 2+ hours.

By all means, go back to AA over a single ancedotal experience if that makes you happy :)

Delta is really, really good at this — moving around inbound aircraft to minimize delays for everyone. I'm constantly impressed at how they can sharpshoot those delays and manage to get everything basically on-time, just by shuffling planes around.

Is DL really padded more than others?

I just random checked ATL-DFW, ALT-LAX and LAX-DFW and all 3 came in with DL having shorter planned flight time than AA (by about 5-10 minutes).

Is there any real evidence that DL (as opposed to all airlines) pads the schedule?

The whole use of the term "padding" is a misnomer.

Air carriers establish their schedules to reasonably account for variables which include any number of factors. This simply means that when things work out, the aircraft is on the gate early. It is entirely appropriate and simply represents a well-educated consideration of factors which often occur.

On any given route, at any given time of day, and with a particular aircraft, any carrier may use a shorter or longer block time.

People don't understand that things like jetstream and weather en-route are uncontrollable variables that must be accounted for. So when they are flying a transcon and arrive an hour early because the jetstream happened to be favorable, they assume that Delta (or any other airline) just crazy pads a schedule to avoid delays.

Which is partially true, but for the most part padding covers uncontrollable variables that tend to fall under a predictable normal or gamma distribution rather than a catch-all for for operational malaise. This is true for all airlines.

All airlines pad - I don't think Delta does it particularly more or less than others.

Delta has great operations - it is the best in the industry. That said, only a portion of its stats advantage is from that. A significant portion (likely a majority) of Delta's performance advantage over its peers has to do with the airports it flies out of. SLC, MSP, DTW, and to a lesser extent ATL are all low-congestion airports. LAX may be somewhat congested but is a good weather airport. SEA has gate issues but usually plenty of runway capacity and - occasional fog issues aside - decent WX.

Compare this to United as an example... they fly out of.. SFO (significant congestion, frequent fog), EWR (significant congestion), ORD (significant congestion). The only low-congestion hubs they have are IAH and DEN. IAD is somewhat in the middle (generally not directly runway constrained, but often ATC constrained due to spillover from the crowded NE corridor).


The only truly difficult hub that Delta flies out of is JFK/LGA.

Again, DL has great ops. Better than UA/AA for sure. Especially when it comes to controllable factors (significantly fewer MX delays and cancellations) and service recovery. But a lot of it has more to do with hub locations (which has its pros/cons.. United can fill a premium-heavy international config because they fly out of more Tier 1 cities - Delta can't, hence their smaller J cabins).

DL certainly benefits from its hubs. I actually think that it might be their most valuable asset.

Everybody flies out of NYC, so you can wash that.

ATL/DTW/MSP/SLC are all relatively reliable, cheap and non competitive The other majors have one or two that can match those, but not with the total capacity DL has. And DL also benefited from the super pro-corporate decision by DOJ to allow WN to take out DL's main LCC competition in ATL (value jet).

I dont mean to make it sound like DL adds crazy padding. However they lean towards scheduling so all flights come out on time/early. They schedule so that all flight factors that could be faced are accounted for all the time. If even one day during that schedule a flight has a chance of being 5 mins longer, they schedule all days 5 mins longer.

It's a common read on here to see DL flights arrive early, and for delayed departures to arrive on time.

It depends on the route. The Southeastern outstations tend to get buffered pretty significantly due to ATL ATC concerns on a normal day. VPS-ATL is something like 47 minutes from wheels up to wheels down on a normal weather day and for a sample day (August 18) Delta has listed flight times of 1:07 (6:00am) 1:14 (7:30 am) 1:17 (9:12 am) 1:20 (12:20 pm) 1:20 (2:32 pm) 1:24 (4:51pm) and 1:17 (6:52pm)

Just saw something on Cranky Flier and DL's June performance was garbage with slightly less than 80% of flights arriving on-time. Of course, AA and UA are even worse. What went wrong for everyone?

Slightly less than 80% is actually better than May when 73% of DL flights were on-time (64% and 61% for UA and AA respectively). During June, DFW saw multiple strong convective storm systems move through. DL's NYC and ATL hubs also saw occasional thunderstorms. To me, 80% isn't terrible in the summertime with thunderstorms.

More on topic, I think OP saw that while Delta does move planes around, it seems they do try to minimize the overall impact to passengers.