Route reliability record
FAI→ANC
Fairbanks to Anchorage
- Flights
- 1,388
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 261 mi
- Carriers
- 1
This route earns an A. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 8 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 1,388 FAI to ANC flights, with a median arrival 11 minutes early.
Best time to fly FAI to ANC: a 8am–11am departure, ideally on a Sunday. Flights in that window arrived on time 93.6% of the time and Sunday flights 89.7%, against 85.1% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 8 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 75 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
85.1%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,374 completed flights
Avg delay
64 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.01%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
Alaska
85.1% on time across 1,388 flights
These figures cover 1,388 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 11 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 FAI to ANC
Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alaska Airlines | 1,388 | 85.1% | 64 min | 1.01% | A |
Flight by flight
Flights on FAI to ANC
The flight numbers below flew this route at least 250 times in the period, busiest first. Each has its own record, with its schedule and delay causes.
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 18 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am266 flights87.8%
- 8am–11am256 flights93.6%
- 11am–2pm368 flights76.1%
- 2pm–5pm223 flights86.5%
- 5pm–8pm42 flights83.3%
- 8pm–5am233 flights85.8%
Scale runs 70% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 76.1% on time against 93.6% for 8am–11am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 368 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 32 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.
December is the weak month at 65.1% on time, against 96.6% 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. March was the busiest month here, with 178 flights.
Across the week, Sunday is the strongest day at 89.7% on time and Saturday the weakest at 82.2%. 8 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. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 62% of the 13,000 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.
- 62%Late-arriving aircraft
- 18%Carrier
- 13%National Airspace System
- 7%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
62% 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 13,000 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 13,135 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 93.6% on time here.
Cancellations sit at 1.01% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.4% 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.
At 261 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 8am–11am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 89.0% on time across 1,389 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,388 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 ANC 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 96.6% on time and December 65.1%, a swing of 32 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 1,374 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
FAI to ANC questions
How often is FAI to ANC delayed?
About one flight in seven arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 14.9% of the 1,388 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by about an hour on average.
How reliable is FAI to ANC compared with the rest of the country?
85.1% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 8 points in its favour. That is worth a A on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on FAI to ANC?
The 8am–11am departure window is the strongest at 93.6% on time. The 11am–2pm window is the weakest at 76.1%, 18 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 December delays on FAI to ANC?
December is the weakest month at 65.1% on time, compared with 96.6% in September. Across the year that is 32 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
- ANC to FAI — the return legseparate record
- FAI to SEA, a related route82.7%
- SEA to ANC, a related route75.2%
- JNU to ANC, a related route83.1%
- Alaska Airlines on-time record85.1%
- 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. FAI to ANC and ANC to FAI 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.