Carrier route record

OODTW→STL

SkyWest Airlines · Detroit to St. Louis

Flights: 183
Period: September 2025 to August 2026
Share of route: 10%
Carriers: 4

Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.

SkyWest on DTW to STL draws a D. Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is an hour and a half behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 183 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 1,104 at 80.4% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so SkyWest on DTW to STL runs 16 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 161 extra late arrivals.

On time

61.2%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 178 completed flights

Avg delay

87 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.64%

National rate is 1.89%

Whole route

76.6%

Every carrier on DTW to STL, 1,899 flights

These figures cover 183 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 14.6% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.

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Carrier by carrier

SkyWest against every carrier on DTW to STL

SkyWest flew 183 of the 1,899 flights on DTW to STL, about 10% of it. Its 61.2% on time is 15 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 76.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Spirit at 100.0% to SkyWest at 61.2%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Delta Air Lines arrives on time 80.4% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 74.3%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 611 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on DTW to STL
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Spirit Airlinesthin sample	1	100.0%	—	0.00%	A+
Delta Air Lines	1,104	80.4%	63 min	1.27%	B
Southwest Airlines	611	74.3%	55 min	0.65%	C+
SkyWest Airlines (this page)thin sample	183	61.2%	87 min	1.64%	D

Delta leads Southwest by 6 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.

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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 21 points, against 6 points between the best and worst carrier.

5am–8am1 flights—
8am–11am116 flights57.5%
11am–2pm49 flights78.7%
2pm–5pm1 flights—
5pm–8pm—
8pm–5am16 flights—

Scale runs 50% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The best window here is not the first bank but the 11am–2pm slot at 78.7% on time, ahead of 8am–11am at 57.5%. 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 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 116 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on DTW to STL through the year

Jul–Sep 20254 flights—
Oct–Dec 202526 flights—
Jan–Mar 2026112 flights55.5%
Apr–Jun 202641 flights85.0%

Scale runs 45% 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 61.2% on time across 183 flights.

Split by quarter, SkyWest on DTW to STL logged 4 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 26 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 112 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 61.2% annual figure is the one to use.

Arrival by arrival

How late SkyWest on DTW to STL runs when it is late

The 69 late arrivals split 20 under half an hour, 23 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 26 an hour or more.

15+ min early16 flights9.0%
Within 15 min93 flights52.2%
15–29 min late20 flights11.2%
30–59 min late23 flights12.9%
1–2 hours late9 flights5.1%
2+ hours late17 flights9.6%

Scale runs 0% to 100%.

Share of 178 completed flights by arrival against schedule.

Time lost at the gate mostly stays lost. Of 50 departures that left 15 minutes late or more, only 4 made it up before arrival. In the other direction, 23 flights left on time yet arrived 15 minutes late or more, so that delay built up after pushback: in the air, in a holding pattern or on the ground at STL.

The worst days

Worst days for SkyWest on DTW to STL

The latest arrival of the period was on 29 December 2025, 12 hours 45 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as extreme weather. On four of the five worst days the largest share was filed as carrier-caused (crew, maintenance, fuelling, baggage).

The latest arrivals of SkyWest on DTW to STL in the period
Date	Arrived late by	Largest filed cause
29 December 2025	12 hours 45 minutes	Extreme weather
23 March 2026	6 hours 22 minutes	Carrier
24 January 2026	6 hours 15 minutes	Carrier
3 February 2026	4 hours 43 minutes	Carrier
19 January 2026	4 hours 6 minutes	Carrier

Delay causes

Why SkyWest runs late on this route

Carrier accounts for 68% of the 6,008 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.

Carrier
68%
Extreme weather
19%
National Airspace System
12%
Security
0%

Extreme weather accounts for 19% 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 3.2 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 6,008 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 68%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 4,095 of the 6,008 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations sit at 1.64% against a national 1.89%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 1.09%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

14.6% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.

At 440 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 71.3% on time across 183 flights, 10 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 10 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 183 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 DTW to STL

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 183 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 61.2% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 178 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated 22 October 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.

Key figures