Carrier route record

OOLAX→IAH

SkyWest Airlines · Los Angeles to Houston

Flights: 408
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 8%
Carriers: 5

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

SkyWest on LAX to IAH lands a B+, 4 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by a little over an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 408 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 3,415 at 87.1% on time.

United Airlines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 87.1% on time across 3,415 flights.

On time

82.0%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 405 completed flights

Avg delay

68 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.49%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

84.6%

Every carrier on LAX to IAH, 5,255 flights

These figures cover 408 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 6 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

SkyWest against every carrier on LAX to IAH

SkyWest flew 408 of the 5,255 flights on LAX to IAH, about 8% of it. Its 82.0% on time is 3 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 84.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 87.1% to Frontier at 68.2%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. United Airlines arrives on time 87.1% of the time; Spirit Airlines manages 77.5%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 455 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on LAX to IAH
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
United Airlines	3,415	87.1%	55 min	0.26%	A+
Delta Air Lines	645	86.1%	73 min	1.09%	A
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	408	82.0%	68 min	0.49%	B+
Spirit Airlines	455	77.5%	83 min	1.32%	B
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	332	68.2%	71 min	2.11%	C

United leads Spirit by 10 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.

Departure window

When SkyWest 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 10 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am—
8am–11am64 flights90.6%
11am–2pm227 flights79.6%
2pm–5pm116 flights81.7%
5pm–8pm1 flights—
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 70% to 95%. 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 79.6% on time against 90.6% 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 227 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on LAX to IAH through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.January best, July worst

July is the worst month at 67.7% on time, 23 points below January, the best at 90.3%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. October was the busiest month here, with 56 flights.

Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 89.1% on time and Wednesday the weakest at 72.7%. 16 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why SkyWest runs late on this route

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 4,991 reported delay minutes.

Late-arriving aircraft
34%
Carrier
32%
National Airspace System
31%
Extreme weather
2%

34% 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 4,991 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 14 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 4,991 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 90.6% on time here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.49%, 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 costs

7.4% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last a little over an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.

The 1,379 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 78.3% on time across 408 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 408 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 SkyWest on LAX to IAH

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 408 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 82.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 405 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