Carrier route record
OODEN→FSD
SkyWest Airlines · Denver to Sioux Falls
- Flights
- 1,313
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 72%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on DEN to FSD earns an A+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 8 points better than the national rate of 77.3%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 1,313 flights, with a median arrival 9 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's DEN to FSD record is 8 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 82 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
85.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,299 completed flights
Avg delay
78 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.99%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
82.8%
Every carrier on DEN to FSD, 1,817 flights
These figures cover 1,313 flights between September 2025 and August 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.
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Carrier by carrier
SkyWest against every carrier on DEN to FSD
SkyWest flew 1,313 of the 1,817 flights on DEN to FSD, most of the route. Its 85.5% on time is 3 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 82.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 85.5% to Frontier at 74.8%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
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) | 1,313 | 85.5% | 78 min | 0.99% | A+ |
| United Airlines | 365 | 75.9% | 86 min | 1.10% | B |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 139 | 74.8% | 77 min | 0.00% | C+ |
Flight by flight
SkyWest flight numbers on DEN to FSD
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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 15 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier.
- 5am–8am45 flights84.4%
- 8am–11am474 flights90.2%
- 11am–2pm359 flights86.5%
- 2pm–5pm75 flights75.3%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am360 flights80.5%
Scale runs 65% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 90.2% of the time, against 75.3% for the afternoon 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 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 474 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
SkyWest on DEN to FSD through the year
December is the weak month at 75.9% on time, against 96.5% in October. 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. August was the busiest month here, with 141 flights.
Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 89.9% on time and Sunday the weakest at 83.1%, a spread of 7 points.
Arrival by arrival
How late SkyWest on DEN to FSD runs when it is late
SkyWest on DEN to FSD often beats the schedule: 444 of 1,299 completed flights, 34%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 188 late arrivals split 59 under half an hour, 56 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 73 an hour or more.
- 15+ min early444 flights34.2%
- Within 15 min667 flights51.3%
- 15–29 min late59 flights4.5%
- 30–59 min late56 flights4.3%
- 1–2 hours late42 flights3.2%
- 2+ hours late31 flights2.4%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 1,299 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
34 of 179 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 19% of them. 43 flights left on time and still arrived late.
The worst days
Worst days for SkyWest on DEN to FSD
The latest arrival of the period was on 2 April 2026, 11 hours 44 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as extreme weather. The same cause led on three of the five worst days.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 2 April 2026 | 11 hours 44 minutes | Extreme weather |
| 30 June 2026 | 11 hours 33 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 17 December 2025 | 11 hours 25 minutes | Extreme weather |
| 19 March 2026 | 10 hours 44 minutes | Carrier |
| 9 June 2026 | 10 hours 19 minutes | Extreme weather |
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 15,000 reported delay minutes.
- 33%Carrier
- 29%Late-arriving aircraft
- 23%Extreme weather
- 15%National Airspace System
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 23% 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 3.8 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 14,638 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 90.2% on time here.
Cancellations sit at 0.99% against a national 1.89%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.08%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
5.6% 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 a little over an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 483 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 82.7% on time across 1,313 flights, within 3 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 1,313 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 DEN to FSD
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. October runs 96.5% on time and December 75.9%, a swing of 21 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 1,299 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DEN to FSD, every carrier
- SkyWest on FSD to DEN, the return leg
- United Airlines on DEN to FSD75.9%
- Frontier Airlines on DEN to FSD74.8%
- SkyWest Airlines network-wide record
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.05 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, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.