Carrier route record

OODEN→MTJ

SkyWest Airlines · Denver to Montrose

Flights: 110
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 8%
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 MTJ earns a B+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 7 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs roughly 50 minutes. That rests on 110 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 886 at 74.6% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's DEN to MTJ record is 7 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 69 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

84.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 110 completed flights

Avg delay

52 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.00%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

75.2%

Every carrier on DEN to MTJ, 1,417 flights

These figures cover 110 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 5 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 MTJ

SkyWest flew 110 of the 1,417 flights on DEN to MTJ, about 8% of it. Its 84.5% on time is 9 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 75.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 84.5% to Southwest at 73.9%.

The two carriers here are closely matched: half a point 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 MTJ
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlines (this page)thin sample	110	84.5%	52 min	0.00%	B+
United Airlines	886	74.6%	67 min	0.11%	C+
Southwest Airlines	421	73.9%	55 min	0.00%	C+

No carrier stands out. United tops the table at 74.6%, half a point 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 110 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split SkyWest's DEN to MTJ record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 84.5% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

SkyWest on DEN to MTJ through the year

Jul–Sep 202549 flights79.6%
Oct–Dec 202515 flights—
Jan–Mar 20265 flights—
Apr–Jun 202641 flights85.4%

Scale runs 70% to 90%. 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 84.5% on time across 110 flights.

Split by quarter, SkyWest on DEN to MTJ logged 49 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 15 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 5 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 41 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 84.5% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why SkyWest runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 54% of the 887 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
54%
Carrier
31%
National Airspace System
13%
Extreme weather
2%

54% 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 887 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 27 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 887 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations are rare at 0.00%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Almost no flights are 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 4.5% 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.

At 197 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 11am–2pm window matters as much as it does.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 75.7% on time across 110 flights, 9 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 9 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 110 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 MTJ

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 110 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 84.5% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 110 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