Route reliability record
ELP→LAX
El Paso to Los Angeles
- Flights
- 1,265
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 715 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route lands a B+, 6 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 a little over an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 1,265 ELP to LAX flights, of which SkyWest Airlines flew 769 at 87.3% on time.
Best time to fly ELP to LAX: a 8am–11am departure, ideally on a Saturday. Flights in that window arrived on time 90.0% of the time and Saturday flights 90.1%, against 83.6% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 6 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 60 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
83.6%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,258 completed flights
Avg delay
79 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.40%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
87.3% on time across 769 flights
These figures cover 1,265 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 8 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
Which airline is most reliable on ELP to LAX
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. SkyWest Airlines arrives on time 87.3% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 78.0%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 496 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines | 769 | 87.3% | 111 min | 0.52% | A+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 496 | 78.0% | 51 min | 0.20% | B+ |
SkyWest leads Southwest by 9 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.
Best ways to make this trip
The most reliable ways to fly El Paso to Los Angeles
Every airline on this route, ranked by how often a scheduled flight actually operated and arrived on time, with its best departure time and most punctual flight number. No nearby airport pair beat these.
| Option | Airline | Success | On time | Cancelled | Best departure | Most punctual flight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. ELP → LAXEl Paso to Los Angeles | SkyWest Airlines | 86.8% | 87.3% | 0.52% | 11am–2pm, Tue | — |
| 2. ELP → LAXEl Paso to Los Angeles | Southwest Airlines | 77.8% | 78.0% | 0.20% | 8am–11am, Wed | — |
Success is the share of scheduled flights that operated and arrived less than 15 minutes late, so a cancelled flight counts against it. “(route)” means the best time comes from every carrier on the route rather than this airline alone.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 26 points, against 9 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am346 flights89.2%
- 8am–11am90 flights90.0%
- 11am–2pm487 flights87.9%
- 2pm–5pm48 flights85.4%
- 5pm–8pm212 flights69.2%
- 8pm–5am82 flights63.8%
Scale runs 55% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 63.8% on time, against 90.0% 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 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 487 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 24 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
June is the worst month at 68.6% on time, 24 points below September, the best at 92.2%. 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. June was the busiest month here, with 118 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 90.1% on time and Sunday the weakest at 77.2%. 13 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 53% of the 16,000 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.
- 53%Carrier
- 40%Late-arriving aircraft
- 5%National Airspace System
- 2%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
40% 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 16,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 23 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 16,318 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 53%, 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 8,637 of the 16,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.40%, 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 actually costs
5.4% 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 a little over an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
The 715 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 80.5% on time across 1,269 flights, 3 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 3 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,265 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in LAX after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. September runs 92.2% on time and June 68.6%, a swing of 24 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of June before you think about anything else. 1,258 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
ELP to LAX questions
How often is ELP to LAX delayed?
About one flight in six arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 16.4% of the 1,265 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
Which airline is most reliable on ELP to LAX?
SkyWest Airlines leads at 87.3% on time across 769 flights. Southwest Airlines is at the other end on 78.0%, a gap of 9 points. Sample size matters as much as the percentage: a rate built from a few hundred flights moves around far more than one built from ten thousand.
What time of day has the fewest delays on ELP to LAX?
The 8am–11am departure window is the strongest at 90.0% on time. The 8pm–5am window is the weakest at 63.8%, 26 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are June delays on ELP to LAX?
June is the weakest month at 68.6% on time, compared with 92.2% in September. Across the year that is 24 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- LAX to ELP — the return legseparate record
- Los Angeles International (LAX) delay statistics
- SkyWest Airlines on ELP to LAX87.3%
- Southwest Airlines on ELP to LAX78.0%
- ELP to DFW, a related route77.9%
- SFO to LAX, a related route73.9%
- ELP to PHX, a related route81.1%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record87.3%
- Southwest Airlines on-time record78.0%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
Direction matters. ELP to LAX and LAX to ELP are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.