Carrier route record

AAELP→PHX

American Airlines · El Paso to Phoenix

Flights: 119
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 5%
Carriers: 4

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with American Airlines.

American on ELP to PHX earns a B+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 7 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs roughly 55 minutes. That rests on 119 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, SkyWest Airlines, flew 852 at 83.9% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, American's ELP to PHX record is 7 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 73 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

84.9%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 119 completed flights

Avg delay

53 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.00%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

81.1%

Every carrier on ELP to PHX, 2,507 flights

These figures cover 119 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

American against every carrier on ELP to PHX

American flew 119 of the 2,507 flights on ELP to PHX, about 5% of it. Its 84.9% on time is 4 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 81.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from American at 84.9% to Southwest at 77.8%. 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 83.9% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 77.8%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,218 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on ELP to PHX
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
American Airlines (this page)thin sample	119	84.9%	53 min	0.00%	B+
Envoy Airthin sample	318	84.8%	59 min	0.63%	B+
SkyWest Airlines	852	83.9%	112 min	0.82%	B+
Southwest Airlines	1,218	77.8%	50 min	0.82%	B+

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

Departure window

When American runs best on this route

Departure time is the single lever a traveller controls, and it moves the odds more than most people expect. Each bar below is the on-time rate for flights scheduled to leave inside that window, across 119 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split American's ELP to PHX record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 84.9% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

American on ELP to PHX through the year

Oct–Dec 202575 flights88.0%
Jan–Mar 202616 flights—
Apr–Jun 202628 flights—

Scale runs 80% to 95%. 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 84.9% on time across 119 flights.

Split by quarter, American on ELP to PHX logged 75 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 16 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 28 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 84.9% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why American runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 58% of the 952 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.

Late-arriving aircraft
58%
National Airspace System
24%
Carrier
10%
Extreme weather
7%

58% 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 952 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 8 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 952 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations are rare at 0.00%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Almost no flights are called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

5.0% 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 roughly 55 minutes, which a normal layover absorbs.

At 347 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 5pm–8pm window matters as much as it does.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 79.0% on time across 119 flights, 6 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 6 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 119 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 American on ELP to PHX

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 119 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 84.9% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 119 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