Route reliability record
ACV→SFO
Arcata/Eureka to San Francisco
- Flights
- 1,283
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 250 mi
- Carriers
- 1
This route draws a D. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is an hour and a half behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 1,283 ACV to SFO flights, with a median arrival 2 minutes late.
Best time to fly ACV to SFO: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Saturday. Flights in that window arrived on time 82.1% of the time and Saturday flights 75.2%, against 63.8% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so this route runs 14 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 138 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
63.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,242 completed flights
Avg delay
87 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.96%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
63.8% on time across 1,283 flights
These figures cover 1,283 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 13.3% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.
Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on ACV to SFO
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 | 1,283 | 63.8% | 87 min | 2.96% | D |
Flight by flight
Flights on ACV to SFO
The flight numbers below flew this route at least 250 times in the period, busiest first. Each has its own record, with its schedule and delay causes.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 54 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–8am292 flights82.1%
- 8am–11am115 flights28.4%
- 11am–2pm—
- 2pm–5pm636 flights67.5%
- 5pm–8pm240 flights47.3%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 20% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 82.1% of the time, against 28.4% for the morning window. That is 54 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 636 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 41 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
June is the worst month at 41.7% on time, 41 points below July, the best at 82.5%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. October was the busiest month here, with 122 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 75.2% on time and Wednesday the weakest at 58.3%. 17 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
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 39,000 reported delay minutes.
- 30%Carrier
- 28%National Airspace System
- 22%Late-arriving aircraft
- 19%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 19% of delay minutes, well above the single-digit share typical across the system. Weather delays are lumpy: they arrive as whole bad days rather than as a steady drag, so the monthly strip above is the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 3.1 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 39,124 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations run at 2.96%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly one flight in 30 cancelled outright. A cancelled flight is invisible in every on-time figure on this page, so the punctuality numbers above describe only the flights that actually operated.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 13.3% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
At 250 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 76.4% on time across 1,285 flights, 13 points above 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 13 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,283 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in SFO after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 2.96% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 5am–8am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 1,242 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
ACV to SFO questions
How often is ACV to SFO delayed?
About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 36.2% of the 1,283 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by an hour and a half on average.
How reliable is ACV to SFO compared with the rest of the country?
63.8% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 14 points against it. That is worth a D on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on ACV to SFO?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 82.1% on time. The 8am–11am window is the weakest at 28.4%, 54 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are June delays on ACV to SFO?
June is the weakest month at 41.7% on time, compared with 82.5% in July. Across the year that is 41 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- SFO to ACV — the return legseparate record
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- LAX to SFO, a related route64.8%
- SEA to SFO, a related route65.6%
- JFK to SFO, a related route74.1%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record63.8%
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- What a cancellation rate actually tells you (and what it hides)
Direction matters. ACV to SFO and SFO to ACV are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.