Carrier route record

ASGEG→PDX

Alaska Airlines · Spokane to Portland

Flights: 548
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 57%
Carriers: 2

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

Alaska on GEG to PDX earns an A. Close to nine flights in ten arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 14 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about 50 minutes. That rests on 548 flights, with a median arrival 7 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, Alaska's GEG to PDX record is 14 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 135 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

91.1%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 541 completed flights

Avg delay

51 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.28%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

87.2%

Every carrier on GEG to PDX, 962 flights

These figures cover 548 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 7 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

Alaska against every carrier on GEG to PDX

Alaska flew 548 of the 962 flights on GEG to PDX, most of the route. Its 91.1% on time is 4 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 87.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from Alaska at 91.1% to SkyWest at 82.0%.

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.

On-time performance by carrier on GEG to PDX
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Alaska Airlines (this page)	548	91.1%	51 min	1.28%	A
SkyWest Airlines	414	82.0%	64 min	0.48%	B+

Departure window

When Alaska runs best on this route

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 11 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–8am243 flights97.1%
8am–11am3 flights—
11am–2pm290 flights86.0%
2pm–5pm—
5pm–8pm12 flights—
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 80% 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 86.0% on time against 97.1% for 5am–8am. 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 290 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Alaska on GEG to PDX through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.November best, December worst

December is the weak month at 84.2% on time, against 98.1% in November. 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. January was the busiest month here, with 60 flights.

Across the week, Sunday is the strongest day at 96.2% on time and Thursday the weakest at 87.7%. 9 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Alaska runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 47% of the 2,438 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.

Carrier
47%
Late-arriving aircraft
45%
National Airspace System
8%

45% 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 2,438 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 45 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 2,438 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 47%, 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 1,146 of the 2,438 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations sit at 1.28% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 2.0% 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 279 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 86.1% on time across 549 flights, 5 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 5 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 548 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 Alaska on GEG to PDX

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 548 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 91.1% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 541 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