Carrier route record
WNDEN→TUL
Southwest Airlines · Denver to Tulsa
- Flights
- 893
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 37%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on DEN to TUL draws a D. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is roughly 55 minutes behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 893 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, SkyWest Airlines, flew 1,129 at 85.4% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Southwest on DEN to TUL runs 14 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 135 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
64.1%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 883 completed flights
Avg delay
53 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.01%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
76.1%
Every carrier on DEN to TUL, 2,432 flights
These figures cover 893 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 10.5% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.
Carrier by carrier
Southwest against every carrier on DEN to TUL
Southwest flew 893 of the 2,432 flights on DEN to TUL, about 37% of it. Its 64.1% on time is 12 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 76.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 85.4% to Southwest at 64.1%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. SkyWest Airlines arrives on time 85.4% of the time; United Airlines manages 76.6%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 367 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines | 1,129 | 85.4% | 69 min | 0.62% | A+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 43 | 76.7% | 74 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| United Airlines | 367 | 76.6% | 75 min | 0.82% | B+ |
| Southwest Airlines (this page) | 893 | 64.1% | 53 min | 1.01% | D |
SkyWest leads United by 9 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.
Departure window
When Southwest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 34 points, against 9 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am245 flights82.7%
- 11am–2pm115 flights72.6%
- 2pm–5pm154 flights59.5%
- 5pm–8pm252 flights52.8%
- 8pm–5am127 flights48.4%
Scale runs 40% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 48.4% on time, against 82.7% 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 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 252 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on DEN to TUL through the year
July is the worst month at 45.1% on time, 39 points below January, the best at 84.1%. 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 92 flights.
Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 67.9% on time and Thursday the weakest at 57.1%. 11 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Southwest runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 59% of the 17,000 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.
- 59%Late-arriving aircraft
- 30%Carrier
- 11%National Airspace System
- 0%Extreme weather
59% 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 17,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 59 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 16,871 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 82.7% on time here.
Cancellations sit at 1.01% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.11%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 10.5% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
The 541 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 82.4% on time across 893 flights, 18 points above 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 18 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 893 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 Southwest on DEN to TUL
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 893 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 64.1% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 883 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DEN to TUL, every carrier
- Southwest on TUL to DEN, the return leg
- SkyWest Airlines on DEN to TUL85.4%
- United Airlines on DEN to TUL76.6%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.