Carrier route record
OOABQ→LAX
SkyWest Airlines · Albuquerque to Los Angeles
- Flights
- 1,717
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 78%
- Carriers
- 2
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on ABQ to LAX earns an A+. Close to nine flights in ten arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 14 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs close to two hours. That rests on 1,717 flights, with a median arrival 13 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's ABQ to LAX record is 14 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 135 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
91.1%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,705 completed flights
Avg delay
108 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.29%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
87.9%
Every carrier on ABQ to LAX, 2,197 flights
These figures cover 1,717 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 13 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.
Carrier by carrier
SkyWest against every carrier on ABQ to LAX
SkyWest flew 1,717 of the 2,197 flights on ABQ to LAX, most of the route. Its 91.1% on time is 3 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 87.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 91.1% to Southwest at 76.4%.
Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines (this page) | 1,717 | 91.1% | 108 min | 0.29% | A+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 480 | 76.4% | 62 min | 1.04% | B |
Flight by flight
SkyWest flight numbers on ABQ to LAX
Departure window
When SkyWest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 13 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am697 flights92.8%
- 8am–11am—
- 11am–2pm680 flights91.5%
- 2pm–5pm44 flights79.5%
- 5pm–8pm296 flights87.8%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 70% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 92.8% of the time, against 79.5% for the afternoon window. That is 13 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 697 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
SkyWest on ABQ to LAX through the year
February is the weak month at 83.3% on time, against 94.3% in January. Winter delays cluster: a single storm system can account for most of a month's shortfall, so an average December hides both very good weeks and genuinely unflyable days. May was the busiest month here, with 163 flights.
The day of the week is close to irrelevant here: 4 points separates the best day from the worst. Weekly demand peaks are not what drives the delays on this operation.
Delay causes
Why SkyWest runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 73% of the 16,000 delay minutes carriers reported, and the remaining four split what is left. The split is by minutes rather than by flights, so a few very long delays count for as much as many short ones.
- 73%Carrier
- 15%Late-arriving aircraft
- 9%Extreme weather
- 2%National Airspace System
- 1%Security
The largest share of delay minutes, 73%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 12,000 of the 16,000 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 16,429 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations are rare at 0.29%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Roughly one flight in 100 is called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.6% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% 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 677 miles between these two airports put this in the middle of the US network, around two and a half to three hours of block time. That is enough cruise to absorb a ten-minute late pushback and not enough to absorb thirty. It is also long enough that the aircraft usually flies three or four legs a day rather than six, which slows how fast delay compounds.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 87.0% on time across 1,718 flights, 4 points below this direction. Departure banks, aircraft rotations and the congestion at each end all differ, so scoring the two directions together would average away a real 4 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,717 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.
What to do with this
Booking SkyWest on ABQ to LAX
Put together: take the 5am–8am departure, avoid February if the dates are flexible, and if two carriers are within a few dollars of each other, Southwest is the one with the record behind it. None of that guarantees an on-time arrival; it moves the odds by 13 points, which is the most any booking decision can do. 1,705 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ABQ to LAX, every carrier
- SkyWest on LAX to ABQ, the return leg
- Southwest Airlines on ABQ to LAX76.4%
- SkyWest Airlines network-wide record
- Los Angeles International (LAX) delay statistics
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, July 2025 to June 2026. Last updated 15 September 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.