Nearly 1,000 daily flights: Delta Air Lines is preparing for its largest year in Atlanta

Delta Air Lines has been gearing up for its busiest year at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), with the airline, while offering fewer weekly flights than in 2019, scheduling substantially more weekly seats for its passengers.

2025 will be a special year for the Atlanta-based airline, as in March, Delta Air Lines will be celebrating its 100th birthday, a momentous occasion and an anniversary that only a handful of airlines in the world have had the opportunity to celebrate.

This includes but is not exclusive to its SkyTeam partners Air France and KLM, and carriers such as Aeroflot, Qantas , avianca, British Airways , Finnair, and the now-defunct Czech Airlines, which managed to celebrate its centennial a year before it was merged into its parent company, Smartwings.

Nevertheless, data from the aviation analytics company Cirium’s Diio Mi airline planning system showed that in 2019, Delta Air Lines averaged 6,679 weekly flights, offering passengers an average of 967,745 weekly seats per month from Atlanta during the year. As a result, its average weekly available seat kilometers (ASK) were more than 1.46 billion.

In 2025, the airline has scheduled an average of 6,391 weekly flights from the airport, which, while fewer than in 2019, will still result in more weekly seats, 1.025 million, and ASKs, 1.6 billion.

The carrier’s average seats per departure from the airport increased from 144.9 in 2019 to 160.3 in 2025, according to Diio Mi data.

July will be the airline's busiest month, with an average of 966.4 daily departures from Atlanta, compared to 966 in June. Interestingly, during the same two summer months in 2019, Delta Air Lines managed to average more than 1,000 departures per day.

However, while in 2019, only three months averaged more than 1 million weekly seats, in 2025, the number should climb to nine, meaning that over a million Delta Air Lines passengers could theoretically pass through Atlanta for the majority of the year.

At the same time, innovations will be coming to the airline’s passenger experience. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, which began on January 7, Delta Air Lines presented several innovations that will impact how travelers fly with the airline.

In 2025, Delta Air Lines will begin integrating ‘Delta Concierge’ into its Fly Delta app. The generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool will “create seamless and personalized moments while making a customer’s journey easier – almost like a personal assistant.”

"The AI assistant will work on behalf of the customer to better understand arrival and departure needs and create efficiencies that save time and stress.”

In addition, the carrier has partnered with Uber – dropping its partnership with Lyft – and YouTube. The former will allow passengers to earn SkyMiles on eligible rides and deliveries, while the latter, building on the Delta Sync experience the company unveiled in 2023, will leverage YouTube’s premium options to bring the platform’s content to its seatback entertainment screens ad-free.

The airline will also upgrade Delta Sync, starting with new aircraft deliveries in 2026. Together with Thales, Delta Air Lines will add “intelligent” 4K HDR QLED displays, Bluetooth capabilities in all cabins, a ground-breaking 96-terabyte storage system delivering more content options, an advanced recommendation engine, and seatback features for passengers to control their journeys, such as a ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode.

Innovations will go beyond the passenger experience. During the same event in Las Vegas, Delta Air Lines and Airbus announced that they would deepen their partnership, focusing on innovations and new technologies, including sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), exploring future aircraft technologies, and testing fello’fly, which mimics formation flying exhibited by geese. According to its statement, the airline will participate in a flight test of the latter in the second half of 2025.

“With this flying technique, the first aircraft creates an uplift that drives fuel efficiency for the following aircraft, called wake energy retrieval, which can reduce fuel consumption.”

During the company’s investor day in November, Ed Bastian, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Delta Air Lines, remarked that the airline’s executives were very sound in their thinking that 2025 would be the best year in the airline’s history.