Carrier route record

OODEN→MCI

SkyWest Airlines · Denver to Kansas City

Flights: 373
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 9%
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 MCI 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 12 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 373 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 1,297 at 78.2% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's DEN to MCI record is 12 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 116 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

89.2%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 371 completed flights

Avg delay

58 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.27%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

75.5%

Every carrier on DEN to MCI, 4,269 flights

These figures cover 373 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 MCI

SkyWest flew 373 of the 4,269 flights on DEN to MCI, about 9% of it. Its 89.2% on time is 14 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 75.5%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 89.2% to Southwest at 71.1%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. United Airlines arrives on time 78.2% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 71.1%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 2,338 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on DEN to MCI
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	373	89.2%	58 min	0.27%	A+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	261	81.5%	68 min	0.00%	B+
United Airlines	1,297	78.2%	66 min	0.39%	B+
Southwest Airlines	2,338	71.1%	56 min	0.47%	C+

United leads Southwest by 7 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.

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 373 flights.

5am–8am22 flights—
8am–11am167 flights94.0%
11am–2pm—
2pm–5pm28 flights—
5pm–8pm—
8pm–5am156 flights86.4%

Scale runs 80% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The early departures do better, though not dramatically: 94.0% on time for the 8am–11am window against 86.4% for 8pm–5am. Worth taking if the schedule allows, not worth an extra connection. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 167 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on DEN to MCI through the year

Jul–Sep 202584 flights96.4%
Oct–Dec 2025123 flights87.8%
Jan–Mar 202672 flights88.7%
Apr–Jun 202694 flights84.9%

Scale runs 75% 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 89.2% on time across 373 flights.

SkyWest on DEN to MCI did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jul–Sep 2025 at 96.4% on time and its weakest Apr–Jun 2026 at 84.9%, a swing of 12 points on roughly 93 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, Tuesday is the strongest day at 94.0% on time and Monday the weakest at 85.2%. 9 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 50% of the 2,298 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
50%
Carrier
26%
National Airspace System
15%
Extreme weather
8%

50% 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 2,298 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 6 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 2,298 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 94.0% on time here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.27%, 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 3.8% 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 533 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 89.5% on time across 374 flights, within half a point 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. 373 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 MCI

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 373 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 89.2% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 371 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