Carrier route record
OODEN→LIT
SkyWest Airlines · Denver to Little Rock
- Flights
- 986
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 63%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on DEN to LIT 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 986 flights, with a median arrival 10 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's DEN to LIT record is 8 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 84 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
85.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 978 completed flights
Avg delay
78 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.61%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
82.6%
Every carrier on DEN to LIT, 1,574 flights
These figures cover 986 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. The median arrival is 10 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 LIT
SkyWest flew 986 of the 1,574 flights on DEN to LIT, most of the route. Its 85.7% on time is 3 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 82.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 85.7% to United at 63.7%. Two 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) | 986 | 85.7% | 78 min | 0.61% | A+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 365 | 81.3% | 43 min | 0.55% | B+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 120 | 77.5% | 91 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| United Airlinesthin sample | 103 | 63.7% | 81 min | 0.97% | D+ |
Flight by flight
SkyWest flight numbers on DEN to LIT
Timetable by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.
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 13 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am360 flights88.9%
- 11am–2pm364 flights89.2%
- 2pm–5pm—
- 5pm–8pm259 flights76.4%
- 8pm–5am3 flights—
Scale runs 70% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The best window here is not the first bank but the 11am–2pm slot at 89.2% on time, ahead of 5pm–8pm at 76.4%. Where the curve peaks mid-day rather than at dawn, the constraint is usually congestion at one end rather than the aircraft's own rotation. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 364 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
SkyWest on DEN to LIT through the year
February is the weak month at 75.9% on time, against 95.0% in June. 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. March was the busiest month here, with 93 flights.
Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 89.2% on time and Friday the weakest at 82.9%, a spread of 6 points.
Arrival by arrival
How late SkyWest on DEN to LIT runs when it is late
SkyWest on DEN to LIT often beats the schedule: 360 of 978 completed flights, 37%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 140 late arrivals split 51 under half an hour, 33 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 56 an hour or more.
- 15+ min early360 flights36.8%
- Within 15 min478 flights48.9%
- 15–29 min late51 flights5.2%
- 30–59 min late33 flights3.4%
- 1–2 hours late42 flights4.3%
- 2+ hours late14 flights1.4%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 978 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
15 of 123 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 12% of them. 32 flights left on time and still arrived late.
The worst days
Worst days for SkyWest on DEN to LIT
The latest arrival of the period was on 22 February 2026, 17 hours 3 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as carrier-caused (crew, maintenance, fuelling, baggage). The same cause led on three of the five worst days.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 22 February 2026 | 17 hours 3 minutes | Carrier |
| 3 December 2025 | 14 hours 51 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 18 February 2026 | 14 hours 19 minutes | Carrier |
| 25 January 2026 | 6 hours 37 minutes | Carrier |
| 19 December 2025 | 3 hours 23 minutes | Extreme weather |
Delay causes
Why SkyWest runs late on this route
Carrier accounts for 46% of the 11,000 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 46%Carrier
- 29%Late-arriving aircraft
- 18%National Airspace System
- 6%Extreme weather
The largest share of delay minutes, 46%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 5,061 of the 11,000 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 10,948 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations are rare at 0.61%, below the national 1.89% 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
5.7% 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.
The 771 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.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 79.3% on time across 985 flights, 6 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 6 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 986 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 LIT
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 986 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 85.7% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 978 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DEN to LIT, every carrier
- SkyWest on LIT to DEN, the return leg
- Southwest Airlines on DEN to LIT81.3%
- Frontier Airlines on DEN to LIT77.5%
- United Airlines on DEN to LIT63.7%
- 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.