Route reliability record
GEG→PHX
Spokane to Phoenix
- Flights
- 1,235
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 1,020 mi
- Carriers
- 4
This route 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 a little over an hour. That rests on 1,235 GEG to PHX flights, of which Southwest Airlines flew 603 at 86.6% on time.
Best time to fly GEG to PHX: a 8am–11am departure, ideally on a Saturday. Flights in that window arrived on time 93.3% of the time and Saturday flights 88.7%, against 84.1% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 7 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 65 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
84.1%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,229 completed flights
Avg delay
79 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.32%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
Southwest
86.6% on time across 603 flights
These figures cover 1,235 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
Which airline is most reliable on GEG to PHX
The two carriers here are closely matched: 3 points separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlines | 603 | 86.6% | 47 min | 0.50% | A+ |
| American Airlines | 577 | 83.4% | 110 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| Envoy Airthin sample | 10 | 70.0% | 38 min | 0.00% | C+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 45 | 63.6% | 64 min | 2.22% | D |
No carrier stands out. Southwest tops the table at 86.6%, 3 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Best ways to make this trip
The most reliable ways to fly Spokane to Phoenix
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. GEG → PHXSpokane to Phoenix | Southwest Airlines | 86.2% | 86.6% | 0.50% | 5am–8am, Sat | — |
| 2. GEG → PHXSpokane to Phoenix | American Airlines | 83.4% | 83.4% | 0.00% | 5am–8am, Tue | — |
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 24 points, against 3 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am580 flights91.7%
- 8am–11am61 flights93.3%
- 11am–2pm62 flights82.0%
- 2pm–5pm449 flights76.4%
- 5pm–8pm80 flights69.6%
- 8pm–5am3 flights—
Scale runs 60% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 93.3% of the time, against 69.6% for the evening window. That is 24 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 580 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 16 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.
January is the weak month at 75.8% on time, against 92.2% 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 131 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 88.7% on time and Sunday the weakest at 81.0%. 8 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 15,000 reported delay minutes.
- 39%Late-arriving aircraft
- 38%Carrier
- 13%Extreme weather
- 10%National Airspace System
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 13% of delay minutes, well above the single-digit share typical across the system. Weather delays are lumpy: they arrive as whole bad days rather than as a steady drag, so the monthly strip above is the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 2.1 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 15,364 reported delay minutes.
39% 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 15,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 3 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.
Cancellations are rare at 0.32%, 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
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.8% 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.
The 1,020 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 75.5% on time across 1,235 flights, 9 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 9 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,235 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 PHX 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 January 75.8%, a swing of 16 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of January before you think about anything else. 1,229 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
GEG to PHX questions
How often is GEG to PHX 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 15.9% of the 1,235 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 GEG to PHX?
Southwest Airlines leads at 86.6% on time across 603 flights. American Airlines is at the other end on 83.4%, a gap of 3 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 GEG to PHX?
The 8am–11am departure window is the strongest at 93.3% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 69.6%, 24 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 January delays on GEG to PHX?
January is the weakest month at 75.8% on time, compared with 92.2% in September. Across the year that is 16 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
- PHX to GEG — the return legseparate record
- Phoenix Sky Harbor International (PHX) delay statistics
- Southwest Airlines on GEG to PHX86.6%
- American Airlines on GEG to PHX83.4%
- GEG to SEA, a related route85.9%
- DEN to PHX, a related route75.7%
- GEG to DEN, a related route83.8%
- Southwest Airlines on-time record86.6%
- American Airlines on-time record83.4%
- Envoy Air on-time record70.0%
- 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. GEG to PHX and PHX to GEG 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.