Route reliability record
FAT→SFO
Fresno to San Francisco
- Flights
- 1,276
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 158 mi
- Carriers
- 1
This route draws a C. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 1,276 FAT to SFO flights, with a median arrival 1 minute late.
Best time to fly FAT to SFO: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Saturday. Flights in that window arrived on time 82.4% of the time and Saturday flights 74.3%, against 67.0% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so this route runs 11 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 106 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
67.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,259 completed flights
Avg delay
80 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.25%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
67.0% on time across 1,276 flights
These figures cover 1,276 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 12.8% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.
Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on FAT to SFO
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines | 1,276 | 67.0% | 80 min | 1.25% | C |
Flight by flight
Flights on FAT to SFO
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 34 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–8am369 flights82.4%
- 8am–11am245 flights48.2%
- 11am–2pm179 flights69.3%
- 2pm–5pm258 flights68.9%
- 5pm–8pm225 flights58.5%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 40% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 82.4% of the time, against 48.2% for the morning window. That is 34 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 369 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 31 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.
Delays peak in April, when the on-time rate falls to 50.9%. March is the strongest month at 82.1%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 31 points. October was the busiest month here, with 144 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 74.3% on time and Monday the weakest at 59.2%. 15 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 33,000 reported delay minutes.
- 38%National Airspace System
- 37%Carrier
- 19%Late-arriving aircraft
- 5%Extreme weather
The largest share of delay minutes, 37%, 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 12,000 of the 33,000 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 33,267 reported delay minutes.
38% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 13,000 minutes out of 33,000, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations sit at 1.25% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.08%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 12.8% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
At 158 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 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 76.4% on time across 1,276 flights, 9 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 9 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,276 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 SFO 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. March runs 82.1% on time and April 50.9%, a swing of 31 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of April before you think about anything else. 1,259 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
FAT to SFO questions
How often is FAT to SFO delayed?
About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 33.0% of the 1,276 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
How reliable is FAT to SFO compared with the rest of the country?
67.0% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 11 points against it. That is worth a C on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on FAT to SFO?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 82.4% on time. The 8am–11am window is the weakest at 48.2%, 34 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 April delays on FAT to SFO?
April is the weakest month at 50.9% on time, compared with 82.1% in March. Across the year that is 31 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
- SFO to FAT — the return legseparate record
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- FAT to SAN, a related route76.2%
- LAX to SFO, a related route64.8%
- FAT to LAS, a related route82.2%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record67.0%
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
Direction matters. FAT to SFO and SFO to FAT 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.