Route reliability record
BFL→PHX
Bakersfield to Phoenix
- Flights
- 1,330
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Distance
- 425 mi
- Carriers
- 3
This route lands a B, 6 points better than the national rate of 77.3%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by an hour and a half on average. That rests on 1,330 BFL to PHX flights, with a median arrival 10 minutes early.
Best time to fly BFL to PHX: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Saturday. Flights in that window arrived on time 89.8% of the time and Saturday flights 86.7%, against 83.4% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 6 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 61 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
83.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,306 completed flights
Avg delay
87 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.73%
National rate is 1.89%
Best carrier
SkyWest
83.2% on time across 930 flights
These figures cover 1,330 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 8.6% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on BFL to PHX
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Airthin sample | 46 | 87.0% | 31 min | 0.00% | A+ |
| American Airlinesthin sample | 354 | 83.4% | 76 min | 1.13% | B |
| SkyWest Airlines | 930 | 83.2% | 94 min | 2.04% | B |
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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 15 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier.
- 5am–8am353 flights89.8%
- 8am–11am254 flights87.4%
- 11am–2pm363 flights81.4%
- 2pm–5pm204 flights78.1%
- 5pm–8pm154 flights75.2%
- 8pm–5am2 flights—
Scale runs 65% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 89.8% of the time, against 75.2% for the evening window. That is 15 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 363 flights scheduled in it.
Explore
Filter BFL to PHX by airline, time, month and day
Pick a breakdown and a carrier. The dashed mark on each row is the same slice for every US flight.
On BFL to PHX, the best departure window is 5am–8am at 89.8% on time and the worst is 5pm–8pm at 75.2%, a wide gap of 14.6 points. All US flights leaving 5am–8am ran 89.3%.
- 5–8am89.8%
- 8–11am87.4%
- 11am–2pm81.4%
- 2–5pm78.1%
- 5–8pm75.2%
- 8pm–5am—
best all US flightsScale 60% to 95%. Cells under 30 flights show a dash.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 22 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.
January is the weak month at 69.6% on time, against 91.4% in May. 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. January was the busiest month here, with 136 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 86.7% on time and Monday the weakest at 78.4%, a spread of 8 points.
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 19,000 reported delay minutes.
- 40%Late-arriving aircraft
- 39%Carrier
- 12%Extreme weather
- 9%National Airspace System
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 12% 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 2.0 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 18,937 reported delay minutes.
40% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 19,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 3 to one.
Cancellations sit at 1.73% against a national 1.89%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.08%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
8.6% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.3%, so a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last an hour and a half, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 425 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 80.3% on time across 1,329 flights, 3 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 3 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,330 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 PHX after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. May runs 91.4% on time and January 69.6%, a swing of 22 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of January before you think about anything else. 1,306 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
BFL to PHX questions
How often is BFL to PHX delayed?
About one flight in six arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 16.6% of the 1,330 flights in this analysis, against 22.7% nationally. Delayed flights are late by an hour and a half on average.
How reliable is BFL to PHX compared with the rest of the country?
83.4% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.3%, a difference of 6 points in its favour. That is worth a B on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on BFL to PHX?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 89.8% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 75.2%, 15 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 January delays on BFL to PHX?
January is the weakest month at 69.6% on time, compared with 91.4% in May. Across the year that is 22 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
- PHX to BFL — the return legseparate record
- Phoenix Sky Harbor International (PHX) delay statistics
- American Airlines on BFL to PHX83.4%
- SkyWest Airlines on BFL to PHX83.2%
- BFL to DEN, a related route86.4%
- DEN to PHX, a related route75.6%
- LAX to PHX, a related route80.3%
- Envoy Air on-time record87.0%
- American Airlines on-time record83.4%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record83.2%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.05 million flight records
Direction matters. BFL to PHX and PHX to BFL 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, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.