Carrier route record
OODEN→OKC
SkyWest Airlines · Denver to Oklahoma City
- Flights
- 1,256
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 40%
- 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 OKC lands a B+, 5 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 1,256 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Frontier Airlines, flew 366 at 75.3% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's DEN to OKC record is 5 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 48 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
82.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,247 completed flights
Avg delay
68 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.48%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
77.0%
Every carrier on DEN to OKC, 3,164 flights
These figures cover 1,256 flights between July 2025 and June 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.
Carrier by carrier
SkyWest against every carrier on DEN to OKC
SkyWest flew 1,256 of the 3,164 flights on DEN to OKC, about 40% of it. Its 82.4% on time is 5 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 77.0%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 82.4% to Southwest at 70.9%. 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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines (this page) | 1,256 | 82.4% | 68 min | 0.48% | B+ |
| United Airlinesthin sample | 319 | 80.4% | 62 min | 0.63% | B+ |
| Frontier Airlines | 366 | 75.3% | 67 min | 0.82% | B+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 1,223 | 70.9% | 55 min | 0.82% | C+ |
No carrier stands out. Frontier tops the table at 75.3%, 4 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Flight by flight
SkyWest flight numbers on DEN to OKC
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 26 points, against 4 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am19 flights—
- 8am–11am461 flights90.2%
- 11am–2pm325 flights84.6%
- 2pm–5pm15 flights—
- 5pm–8pm86 flights64.0%
- 8pm–5am350 flights73.5%
Scale runs 55% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 64.0% on time, against 90.2% for the 8am–11am slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 461 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
SkyWest on DEN to OKC through the year
August is the worst month at 72.3% on time, 20 points below April, the best at 92.1%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. July was the busiest month here, with 154 flights.
The day of the week is close to irrelevant here: 4 points separates the best day from the worst. Weekly demand peaks are not what drives the delays on this operation.
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.
- 37%Carrier
- 30%Late-arriving aircraft
- 24%National Airspace System
- 10%Extreme weather
The largest share of delay minutes, 37%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 5,506 of the 15,000 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 14,818 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 are rare at 0.48%, 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
6.7% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last about an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 495 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 81.9% on time across 1,262 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.
The sample behind these figures is 1,256 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 OKC
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. April runs 92.1% on time and August 72.3%, a swing of 20 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of August before you think about anything else. 1,247 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DEN to OKC, every carrier
- SkyWest on OKC to DEN, the return leg
- United Airlines on DEN to OKC80.4%
- Frontier Airlines on DEN to OKC75.3%
- Southwest Airlines on DEN to OKC70.9%
- SkyWest Airlines network-wide record
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 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, July 2025 to June 2026. Last updated 15 September 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.