Flight number record
UA 1896
United Airlines · San Francisco to Los Angeles
- Route
- SFO → LAX
- Departs
- 08:50
- Flights
- 264
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s UA 1896, check with United Airlines.
UA 1896 earns an A+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 8 points better than the national rate of 77.3%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about 40 minutes. That rests on 264 flights, with a median arrival 3 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, UA 1896's record is 8 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 79 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
85.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 264 completed flights
Avg delay
39 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.00%
National rate is 1.89%
1 hour+ late
1.9%
National rate is 8.3%
These figures cover 264 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. The median arrival is 3 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.
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Schedule
When UA 1896 flies
UA 1896 flies SFO to LAX without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 08:50, used on 74 of 264 flights, with 09:10 (70 flights) and 08:49 (27 flights) next.
- Departs 08:5074 flights28.0%
- Departs 09:1070 flights26.5%
- Departs 08:4927 flights10.2%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of scheduled departures at each local time. Times used on fewer than one flight in ten are not listed.
A 08:50 departure sits in the 8am–11am window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 83.9%, and UA 1896 runs level with that at 85.2%. Early departures usually start with an aircraft that has not flown yet that day, which is most of why the window does well.
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Against the route
UA 1896 next to SFO to LAX
Every carrier on SFO to LAX combined arrived on time 70.9% of the time across 11,437 flights, so UA 1896 is 14 points ahead of it. United flew 3,335 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 77.7% on time. Across its whole network United Airlines managed 78.8%, which this flight beats by 6 points.
| Compared with | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UA 1896thin sample | 264 | 85.2% | 39 min | 0.00% | A+ |
| All United Airlines on SFO–LAX | 3,335 | 77.7% | 46 min | 0.15% | B+ |
| All carriers on SFO–LAX | 11,437 | 70.9% | 58 min | 0.82% | C+ |
| United Airlines, whole network | 830,825 | 78.8% | 73 min | 1.02% | B |
Across the year
UA 1896 quarter by quarter
Quarter by quarter UA 1896 held fairly steady: 83.3% in Oct–Dec 2025, 86.1% in Jan–Mar 2026, 84.4% in Apr–Jun 2026 and 87.8% in Jul–Sep 2026. A spread of 5 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.
- Oct–Dec 202554 flights83.3%
- Jan–Mar 202679 flights86.1%
- Apr–Jun 202690 flights84.4%
- Jul–Sep 202641 flights87.8%
Scale runs 75% to 95%.
By weekday, UA 1896 ranged from 82.9% on Wednesday to 92.9% on Monday. With about 38 flights behind each day, a spread of 10 points is inside normal variation, so the day you fly is not worth changing for this flight.
Arrival by arrival
How late UA 1896 runs when it is late
Most of the lateness is short. 20 of the 39 late arrivals were under half an hour behind, and 5 reached an hour or more.
- 15+ min early30 flights11.4%
- Within 15 min195 flights73.9%
- 15–29 min late20 flights7.6%
- 30–59 min late14 flights5.3%
- 1–2 hours late3 flights1.1%
- 2+ hours late2 flights0.8%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 264 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
3 of 24 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 13% of them. In the other direction, 18 flights left on time yet arrived 15 minutes late or more, so that delay built up after pushback: in the air, in a holding pattern or on the ground at LAX.
The worst days
Worst days for UA 1896
The latest arrival of the period was on 30 December 2025, 4 hours 41 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. On three of the five worst days the largest share was filed as national airspace system delay.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 30 December 2025 | 4 hours 41 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 26 June 2026 | 2 hours 12 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 24 December 2025 | 1 hour 14 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 16 February 2026 | 1 hour 7 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 19 July 2026 | 1 hour 5 minutes | National Airspace System |
Delay causes
Why UA 1896 runs late
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 1,532 reported delay minutes.
- 39%National Airspace System
- 36%Late-arriving aircraft
- 23%Carrier
- 2%Extreme weather
36% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 1,532 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 23 to one. The split is drawn from 1,532 delay minutes reported on UA 1896.
Cancellations are rare at 0.00%, below the national 1.89% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Almost no flights are called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.
Connections and routes
What a delay on this flight costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 1.9% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% 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 same number turns up on ten other city pairs in the data, including PDX to SFO (102), LAX to CLE (81) and TPA to DEN (31), but none flew often enough under UA 1896 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to SFO to LAX only.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 264 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor but not enough to pin the rate down tightly, and a single bad week moves it by more than a point. Treat the grade as a rough reading.
What to do with this
Booking UA 1896
For a booking, UA 1896 has one of the better records a US domestic flight can show: 85.2% on time and 0.00% cancelled. That is a base rate, not a promise about any single day.
Related
Where to go next
- SFO to LAX, every carrier and departure
- LAX to SFO, the return direction
- Delta Air Lines 1598 on the same route93.4%
- Delta Air Lines 1421 on the same route89.7%
- Delta Air Lines 2267 on the same route49.2%
- United Airlines 2179 on the same route68.5%
- United Airlines 1754 on the same route71.8%
- Delta Air Lines 1715 on the same route56.1%
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- Los Angeles International (LAX) delay statistics
- United Airlines on-time record
- Every United Airlines flight number with a record
- The most and least reliable flight numbers in the US
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
A flight number here means United Airlines’s own number as it reports to the DOT. How the figures are computed is on the methodology page.
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.