Guide
California intrastate flights: which routes run on time
Long Beach to Oakland ran 88.5% on time over September 2025 to August 2026; Los Angeles to San Francisco 60.1%. Inside California, the arrival airport decides almost everything.
Take the seventy-odd routes between California airports that have a page on this site and sort them by on-time rate. The bottom of the list is almost a single airport. San Luis Obispo to San Francisco, Arcata to San Francisco, Burbank to San Francisco, Los Angeles to San Francisco, Ontario to San Francisco, Santa Barbara to San Francisco, San Diego to San Francisco: every one of them sits in the bottom few dozen of the 2,978 routes in the country. The top of the list is almost a single airline, flying between airports most travellers from outside the state could not place on a map.
Over September 2025 to August 2026, Los Angeles to San Francisco, the busiest route in the state, ran 60.1% on time, rank 2,964. Long Beach to Oakland, a Southwest route with a fraction of the traffic, ran 88.5%, rank 117.
Both are about 350 miles.
US average 77.3%
50.0%95.0%
The twelve best and twelve worst of the state's route pages. The line under each bar is the cancellation rate. Dashed line: US average. Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, September 2025 to August 2026.
The San Francisco arrival problem
San Francisco's two main arrival runways sit too close together to use side by side when cloud is low, and the marine layer that rolls in off the Pacific cuts its landing rate. The FAA then holds San Francisco-bound flights on the ground at their origin until there is room. The Bay Area guide explains the runway geometry; what matters here is who pays for it. The answer is every short flight inside California, because a 300-mile flight has almost no time in the air to make anything up.
50.0%85.0%
Flights into SFO are highlighted. Each pair is the same route in both directions. Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, September 2025 to August 2026.
On every California route pair touching San Francisco, the flight into SFO ran worse than the flight out, and usually by a wide margin. The pipeline keeps each direction as its own record, and here that matters: averaged together, these pairs would look merely mediocre. Burbank to San Francisco ran 59.3% against 74.9% for the return. San Diego is the exception where both directions are poor: San Diego to San Francisco ran 59.5% and the return 62.2%, consistent with an airport that lands everything on a single runway. Santa Barbara to San Francisco ran 61.3% against 78.2% the other way. Sacramento to San Francisco, 86 miles, ran 62.2%; Monterey to San Francisco, 77 miles, 58.5%, with 66% of its delay minutes charged to the air traffic system. The Los Angeles pair is the best-known case, and the opposite-direction guide covers it in detail.
LAX → SFO60.1% overall
SFO → LAX70.9% overall
SAN → SFO59.5% overall
SMF → SFO62.2% overall
All panels share one scale. Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, September 2025 to August 2026.
The hour-by-hour shape points to the mechanism. The first flights into SFO, leaving before 8am, run well: 85.8% from Los Angeles. The next window collapses, to 49.8% from Los Angeles between 8am and 11am and 40.2% from Sacramento. That is consistent with ground delay programmes that start with SFO's big late-morning arrival bank, while low cloud often still sits on the bay, and run on into the afternoon because demand stays above the reduced landing rate: flights after 11am recovered only part of the way. The spring made it worse. From April to July 2026 several routes into SFO fell to roughly 35 to 50% on time: Los Angeles to San Francisco ran 44.1% in May 2026 and San Diego to San Francisco 38.8% in June 2026. When I first saw those months I assumed a bug in my aggregation. Checked against the raw month files, the numbers are in the data. The data does not say why, and I will not guess.
The worst single flights in the state follow the pattern: Delta 2267 and United 1791 from Los Angeles and SkyWest 5961 from Sacramento are among the least punctual California flight numbers, while Delta 1598, the 6am the other way, is among the best.
The carrier matters on the trunk routes
On Los Angeles to San Francisco, seven airlines split the traffic, and none escapes the arrival programme. SkyWest's regional flights ran best in this period, United's own and Delta's close behind, while Southwest on the route and Alaska trailed. On San Diego to San Francisco the ranking is similar, with United well ahead of Southwest. As the hub carrier, United holds most of San Francisco's arrival slots and can reorder its own flights when a ground delay programme is in force, which is consistent with that edge.
Southwest's other California
The best-run corner of the state is the network San Francisco does not touch. Southwest links the Los Angeles basin's secondary airports, Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario and Orange County, with San Jose, Oakland and Sacramento, and those routes fill the top of the California ranking: Burbank to San Jose at 86.3%, Orange County to Sacramento at 86.2%, Ontario to Oakland at 86.0%, Long Beach to San Jose at 86.0%.
Share of all delay minutes. Darker is a bigger share. Air traffic is the National Airspace System category; weather is extreme weather only.
| Late aircraft | Airline | Air traffic | Weather | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LAX–SFO | 24 | 18 | 56 | 1 |
| SAN–SFO | 32 | 13 | 53 | 2 |
| SFO–LAX | 58 | 21 | 20 | 1 |
| SNA–SMF | 71 | 23 | 7 | 0 |
| LAX–SJC | 49 | 41 | 5 | 4 |
| BUR–SJC | 78 | 18 | 2 | 1 |
| LAX–OAK | 68 | 30 | 2 | 0 |
Rows ranked by the air traffic share. Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, September 2025 to August 2026.
The cause codes show why. On Los Angeles to Oakland the air traffic system accounts for only 2% of delay minutes, and on Burbank to San Jose 2%, against 56% on Los Angeles to San Francisco. Oakland, San Jose and Sacramento all have room to land. Their delays come from the airline's own rotations, and Southwest's shape applies: excellent at dawn, weaker by evening. Los Angeles to San Jose is the cleanest way from LAX to the Bay Area at 85.6%, with SkyWest again the most punctual operator on it.
San Diego's southbound problem
The one Southwest weakness is San Diego. Flights up the state from San Diego ran reasonably, but the flights home ran worse: Oakland to San Diego at 62.7%, San Jose to San Diego at 68.3% and Sacramento to San Diego at 69.8%. Oakland to San Diego falls from 91.1% at dawn to 43.1% between 5pm and 8pm, one of the steepest daily curves of any busy route in the country. A single-runway destination with no slack and aircraft that have flown all day is consistent with that. The San Diego guide covers the airport.
The small fields
SkyWest's short hops from Los Angeles to the smaller California airports are among the most reliable flying in the state: Los Angeles to Monterey at 88.9%, Los Angeles to Santa Rosa at 89.4% and Los Angeles to Fresno at 86.3%. The same small fields linked to San Francisco are among the worst: Arcata to San Francisco ran 56.5% and cancelled 2.71%, Redding to San Francisco 69.7%, Palm Springs to San Francisco 61.1%. A traveller from Monterey or Fresno reaching the rest of the world through LAX had a far more reliable first leg than one going through SFO.
What I would book inside California
Avoid SFO as a destination if the trip allows. Oakland and San Jose are the reliable Bay Area arrivals from every Southern California airport, and unless the trip truly needs SFO, that is where I would land. The Los Angeles airports guide shows the southern end of the same trade.
If it must be SFO, take the first departure of the day. Only the flights leaving before 8am reliably beat the arrival programme; waiting for the afternoon helped far less than the fog-burns-off rule of thumb suggests.
Fly from the secondary airports. Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario and Orange County to San Jose, Oakland or Sacramento were the most punctual intrastate flying in this period.
Leaving the Bay Area is easy; returning is not. Budget more slack for the flight home than for the flight out, and check tight connections with the connection risk tool.
Compare the fields: San Francisco (SFO) · Oakland (OAK) · San Jose (SJC) · Sacramento (SMF) · Los Angeles (LAX) · Burbank (BUR) · Orange County (SNA) · Ontario (ONT) · San Diego (SAN)