Carrier route record

OODEN→ABQ

SkyWest Airlines · Denver to Albuquerque

Flights: 895
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 28%
Carriers: 3

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.

SkyWest on DEN to ABQ lands a B+, 6 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 895 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 817 at 76.7% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's DEN to ABQ record is 6 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 59 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

83.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 887 completed flights

Avg delay

62 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.78%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

77.4%

Every carrier on DEN to ABQ, 3,176 flights

These figures cover 895 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 8 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 DEN to ABQ

SkyWest flew 895 of the 3,176 flights on DEN to ABQ, about 28% of it. Its 83.5% on time is 6 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 77.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 83.5% to Southwest at 74.1%.

The two carriers here are closely matched: 3 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.

On-time performance by carrier on DEN to ABQ
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	895	83.5%	62 min	0.78%	B+
United Airlines	817	76.7%	63 min	0.37%	B+
Southwest Airlines	1,464	74.1%	54 min	0.41%	C+

No carrier stands out. United tops the table at 76.7%, 3 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.

Flight by flight

SkyWest flight numbers on DEN to ABQ

OO 548708:1092.2% · 335 flights

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 23 points, against 3 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am—
8am–11am339 flights92.3%
11am–2pm—
2pm–5pm319 flights80.3%
5pm–8pm144 flights69.2%
8pm–5am93 flights84.9%

Scale runs 60% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 92.3% of the time, against 69.2% for the evening window. That is 23 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 339 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on DEN to ABQ through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.November best, July worst

July is the worst month at 66.3% on time, 28 points below November, the best at 94.3%. 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. August was the busiest month here, with 93 flights.

Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 87.5% on time and Thursday the weakest at 76.6%. 11 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why SkyWest runs late on this route

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 9,057 reported delay minutes.

Carrier
30%
Late-arriving aircraft
30%
National Airspace System
25%
Extreme weather
14%

Extreme weather accounts for 14% 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 2.3 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 9,057 reported delay minutes.

The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 92.3% on time here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.78%, 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

6.0% 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.

At 349 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 8am–11am window matters as much as it does.

The return leg runs 85.6% on time across 895 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.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 895 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor but not enough to pin the rate down tightly, and a single bad week moves it by more than a point. Treat the grade as a rough reading.

What to do with this

Booking SkyWest on DEN to ABQ

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 895 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 83.5% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 887 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

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.

Key figures