Carrier route record

OODEN→GEG

SkyWest Airlines · Denver to Spokane

Flights: 250
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 12%
Carriers: 4

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

SkyWest on DEN to GEG earns an A+. Close to nine flights in ten arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 13 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs roughly 45 minutes. That rests on 250 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 833 at 74.3% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's DEN to GEG record is 13 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 127 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

90.3%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 247 completed flights

Avg delay

47 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.80%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

75.2%

Every carrier on DEN to GEG, 2,062 flights

These figures cover 250 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 GEG

SkyWest flew 250 of the 2,062 flights on DEN to GEG, about 12% of it. Its 90.3% on time is 15 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 75.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 90.3% to Southwest at 70.1%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The two carriers here are closely matched: 4 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 GEG
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlines (this page)thin sample	250	90.3%	47 min	0.80%	A+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	122	86.1%	34 min	0.00%	A+
United Airlines	833	74.3%	53 min	0.24%	C+
Southwest Airlines	857	70.1%	48 min	0.35%	C+

No carrier stands out. United tops the table at 74.3%, 4 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.

Departure window

When SkyWest runs best on this route

Departure time is the single lever a traveller controls, and it moves the odds more than most people expect. Each bar below is the on-time rate for flights scheduled to leave inside that window, across 250 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split SkyWest's DEN to GEG record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 90.3% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

SkyWest on DEN to GEG through the year

Jul–Sep 202543 flights100.0%
Oct–Dec 202591 flights88.9%
Jan–Mar 202666 flights79.7%
Apr–Jun 202650 flights98.0%

Scale runs 70% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 90.3% on time across 250 flights.

SkyWest on DEN to GEG did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jul–Sep 2025 at 100.0% on time and its weakest Jan–Mar 2026 at 79.7%, a swing of 20 points on roughly 63 flights a quarter. The twelve-month rate averages over that, so if you are flying in a weak quarter the quarter's own figure is the better guide.

Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 94.3% on time and Saturday the weakest at 82.9%. 11 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why SkyWest runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 52% of the 1,133 delay minutes carriers reported, and the remaining four split what is left. The split is by minutes rather than by flights, so a few very long delays count for as much as many short ones.

Late-arriving aircraft
52%
Carrier
28%
National Airspace System
17%
Extreme weather
2%

52% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. That is a cascade, and cascades start small and grow through the day. Across 1,133 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 21 to one. It is the strongest argument for booking the first departure of the morning, when the aircraft has been sitting at the gate overnight with nothing to inherit. The split is drawn from 1,133 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations are rare at 0.80%, 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

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.2% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. Connections built on this flight are about as safe as US domestic connections get, though a cancelled flight still ignores every layover you give it.

The 836 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 is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 86.7% on time across 250 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 250 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 GEG

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 250 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 90.3% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 247 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