Route reliability record
GTF→SLC
Great Falls to Salt Lake City
- Flights
- 1,071
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 463 mi
- Carriers
- 1
This route 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 15 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 1,071 GTF to SLC flights, with a median arrival 14 minutes early.
Best time to fly GTF to SLC: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 96.2% of the time and Tuesday flights 97.5%, against 92.3% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 15 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 147 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
92.3%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,063 completed flights
Avg delay
78 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.75%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
92.3% on time across 1,071 flights
These figures cover 1,071 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 14 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 GTF to SLC
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 | 1,071 | 92.3% | 78 min | 0.75% | A+ |
Flight by flight
Flights on GTF to SLC
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 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 1,071 flights.
- 5am–8am365 flights96.2%
- 8am–11am—
- 11am–2pm364 flights92.5%
- 2pm–5pm—
- 5pm–8pm342 flights87.9%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 80% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 96.2% of the time, against 87.9% for the evening window. That is 8 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 365 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 17 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 March, when the on-time rate falls to 82.0%. June is the strongest month at 98.9%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 17 points. May was the busiest month here, with 93 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 97.5% on time and Sunday the weakest at 88.7%. 9 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. Carrier accounts for 56% of the 6,363 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.
- 56%Carrier
- 39%Extreme weather
- 5%National Airspace System
Extreme weather accounts for 39% 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 6.2 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 6,363 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 56%, 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 3,588 of the 6,363 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.75%, 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 2.3% 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 463 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 runs 93.2% on time across 1,071 flights, within about a point of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 1,071 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in SLC after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 1,071 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 92.3% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 1,063 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
GTF to SLC questions
How often is GTF to SLC delayed?
Roughly one flight in twelve arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 7.7% of the 1,071 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
How reliable is GTF to SLC compared with the rest of the country?
92.3% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 15 points in its favour. That is worth a A+ on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on GTF to SLC?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 96.2% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 87.9%, 8 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 March delays on GTF to SLC?
March is the weakest month at 82.0% on time, compared with 98.9% in June. Across the year that is 17 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
- SLC to GTF — the return legseparate record
- Salt Lake City International (SLC) delay statistics
- GTF to DEN, a related route85.6%
- DEN to SLC, a related route77.5%
- PHX to SLC, a related route83.0%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record92.3%
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
Direction matters. GTF to SLC and SLC to GTF 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.