Route reliability record
BZN→SEA
Bozeman to Seattle
- Flights
- 1,571
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 543 mi
- Carriers
- 3
This route earns a B+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 7 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 1,571 BZN to SEA flights, of which SkyWest Airlines flew 948 at 86.3% on time.
Best time to fly BZN to SEA: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Wednesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 92.7% of the time and Wednesday flights 87.6%, against 84.4% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 7 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 68 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
84.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,556 completed flights
Avg delay
67 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.70%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
86.3% on time across 948 flights
These figures cover 1,571 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 9 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
Which airline is most reliable on BZN to SEA
The two carriers here are closely matched: 5 points separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delta Air Linesthin sample | 1 | 100.0% | — | 0.00% | A+ |
| SkyWest Airlines | 948 | 86.3% | 70 min | 0.21% | A+ |
| Alaska Airlines | 622 | 81.5% | 63 min | 1.45% | B |
No carrier stands out. SkyWest tops the table at 86.3%, 5 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Best ways to make this trip
The most reliable ways to fly Bozeman to Seattle
Every airline on this route, ranked by how often a scheduled flight actually operated and arrived on time, with its best departure time and most punctual flight number. No nearby airport pair beat these.
| Option | Airline | Success | On time | Cancelled | Best departure | Most punctual flight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. BZN → SEABozeman to Seattle | SkyWest Airlines | 86.1% | 86.3% | 0.21% | 5am–8am, Wed | — |
| 2. BZN → SEABozeman to Seattle | Alaska Airlines | 80.3% | 81.5% | 1.45% | 5am–8am, Tue | — |
Success is the share of scheduled flights that operated and arrived less than 15 minutes late, so a cancelled flight counts against it. “(route)” means the best time comes from every carrier on the route rather than this airline alone.
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 31 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am469 flights92.7%
- 8am–11am83 flights88.9%
- 11am–2pm183 flights83.0%
- 2pm–5pm551 flights82.1%
- 5pm–8pm227 flights78.6%
- 8pm–5am58 flights62.1%
Scale runs 55% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 62.1% on time, against 92.7% for the 5am–8am slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 551 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 13 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.
December is the weak month at 77.2% on time, against 90.4% 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. December was the busiest month here, with 161 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 87.6% on time and Thursday the weakest at 81.2%. 6 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 16,000 reported delay minutes.
- 41%Carrier
- 28%Late-arriving aircraft
- 18%National Airspace System
- 13%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 13% 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 2.1 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 16,146 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 41%, 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 6,676 of the 16,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.70%, 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 actually costs
5.4% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last about an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
The 543 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 runs 82.8% on time across 1,572 flights, within 2 points of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
The sample behind these figures is 1,571 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 SEA 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. January runs 90.4% on time and December 77.2%, a swing of 13 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 1,556 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
BZN to SEA questions
How often is BZN to SEA 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 15.6% of the 1,571 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by about an hour on average.
Which airline is most reliable on BZN to SEA?
SkyWest Airlines leads at 86.3% on time across 948 flights. Alaska Airlines is at the other end on 81.5%, a gap of 5 points. Sample size matters as much as the percentage: a rate built from a few hundred flights moves around far more than one built from ten thousand.
What time of day has the fewest delays on BZN to SEA?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 92.7% on time. The 8pm–5am window is the weakest at 62.1%, 31 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 December delays on BZN to SEA?
December is the weakest month at 77.2% on time, compared with 90.4% in January. Across the year that is 13 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
- SEA to BZN — the return legseparate record
- Seattle-Tacoma International (SEA) delay statistics
- SkyWest Airlines on BZN to SEA86.3%
- Alaska Airlines on BZN to SEA81.5%
- BZN to DEN, a related route76.9%
- LAX to SEA, a related route85.4%
- BZN to ORD, a related route73.5%
- Delta Air Lines on-time record100.0%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record86.3%
- Alaska Airlines on-time record81.5%
- 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
Direction matters. BZN to SEA and SEA to BZN 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.