Carrier route record
ASLAX→PDX
Alaska Airlines · Los Angeles to Portland
- Flights
- 1,899
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 43%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Alaska Airlines.
Alaska on LAX 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 12 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about 50 minutes. That rests on 1,899 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 1,690 at 86.2% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Alaska's LAX to PDX record is 12 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 124 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
90.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,882 completed flights
Avg delay
51 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.90%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
86.4%
Every carrier on LAX to PDX, 4,406 flights
These figures cover 1,899 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 11 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 LAX to PDX
Alaska flew 1,899 of the 4,406 flights on LAX to PDX, about 43% of it. Its 90.0% on time is 4 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 86.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Alaska at 90.0% to SkyWest at 76.2%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Delta Air Lines arrives on time 86.2% of the time; SkyWest Airlines manages 76.2%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 599 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alaska Airlines (this page) | 1,899 | 90.0% | 51 min | 0.90% | A+ |
| Delta Air Lines | 1,690 | 86.2% | 74 min | 0.89% | A+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 218 | 85.1% | 49 min | 1.38% | A |
| SkyWest Airlines | 599 | 76.2% | 87 min | 0.33% | B+ |
Delta leads SkyWest by 10 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.
Flight by flight
Alaska flight numbers on LAX to PDX
Departure window
When Alaska runs best on this route
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 1,899 flights.
- 5am–8am360 flights93.9%
- 8am–11am139 flights92.5%
- 11am–2pm305 flights87.7%
- 2pm–5pm433 flights90.7%
- 5pm–8pm397 flights87.2%
- 8pm–5am265 flights88.9%
Scale runs 80% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The early departures do better, though not dramatically: 93.9% on time for the 5am–8am window against 87.2% for 5pm–8pm. Worth taking if the schedule allows, not worth an extra connection. The 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 433 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Alaska on LAX to PDX through the year
December is the weak month at 86.1% on time, against 94.4% in May. 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. July was the busiest month here, with 193 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 92.3% on time and Friday the weakest at 85.0%. 7 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. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 50% of the 9,638 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.
- 50%Late-arriving aircraft
- 38%Carrier
- 12%National Airspace System
50% 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 9,638 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 50 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 9,638 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 38%, 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 3,618 of the 9,638 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations sit at 0.90% 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 2.6% 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 833 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 86.5% on time across 1,897 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.
The sample behind these figures is 1,899 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.
What to do with this
Booking Alaska on LAX to PDX
Put together: take the 5am–8am departure, avoid December if the dates are flexible, and if two carriers are within a few dollars of each other, Delta is the one with the record behind it. None of that guarantees an on-time arrival; it moves the odds by 10 points, which is the most any booking decision can do. 1,882 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- LAX to PDX, every carrier
- Alaska on PDX to LAX, the return leg
- Delta Air Lines on LAX to PDX86.2%
- Frontier Airlines on LAX to PDX85.1%
- SkyWest Airlines on LAX to PDX76.2%
- Alaska Airlines network-wide record
- Los Angeles International (LAX) delay statistics
- Portland International (PDX) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
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.