Carrier route record

OODSM→DEN

SkyWest Airlines · Des Moines to Denver

Flights: 936
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 DSM to DEN 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 close to two hours. That rests on 936 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Southwest Airlines, flew 559 at 83.4% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's DSM to DEN record is 12 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 124 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

90.0%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 928 completed flights

Avg delay

101 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.75%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

83.0%

Every carrier on DSM to DEN, 2,329 flights

These figures cover 936 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 14 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 DSM to DEN

SkyWest flew 936 of the 2,329 flights on DSM to DEN, about 40% of it. Its 90.0% on time is 7 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 83.0%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 90.0% to United at 74.2%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Southwest Airlines arrives on time 83.4% of the time; United Airlines manages 74.2%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 681 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on DSM to DEN
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	936	90.0%	101 min	0.75%	A+
Southwest Airlines	559	83.4%	72 min	0.54%	B+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	153	77.8%	102 min	0.00%	B+
United Airlines	681	74.2%	77 min	0.59%	C+

Southwest leads United by 9 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 matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 15 points, against 9 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am357 flights91.2%
8am–11am—
11am–2pm494 flights91.4%
2pm–5pm—
5pm–8pm85 flights76.5%
8pm–5am—

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 91.4% on time, ahead of 5pm–8pm at 76.5%. 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 494 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on DSM to DEN through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.September best, December worst

December is the weak month at 80.3% on time, against 98.8% in September. 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. July was the busiest month here, with 96 flights.

Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 93.5% on time and Friday the weakest at 85.0%. 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. Carrier accounts for 43% of the 9,390 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.

Carrier
43%
Late-arriving aircraft
26%
Extreme weather
18%
National Airspace System
13%
Security
0%

Extreme weather accounts for 18% of delay minutes, well above the single-digit share typical across the system. Weather delays are lumpy: they arrive as whole bad days rather than as a steady drag, so the monthly strip above is the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 2.9 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 9,390 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 43%, 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 4,002 of the 9,390 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.75%, 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 4.3% 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 589 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 88.2% on time across 936 flights, within 2 points 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. 936 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 DSM to DEN

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 936 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 90.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 928 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