Carrier route record

DLLAX→PHX

Delta Air Lines · Los Angeles to Phoenix

Flights: 142
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 2%
Carriers: 7

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

Delta on LAX to PHX lands a B+, 5 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 142 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, SkyWest Airlines, flew 2,590 at 87.2% on time.

SkyWest Airlines is the most reliable of the four carriers covered here at 87.2% on time across 2,590 flights.

On time

83.0%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 141 completed flights

Avg delay

77 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.70%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

80.9%

Every carrier on LAX to PHX, 7,608 flights

These figures cover 142 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 15 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

Delta against every carrier on LAX to PHX

Delta flew 142 of the 7,608 flights on LAX to PHX, about 2% of it. Its 83.0% on time is 2 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 80.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number four of seven carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 87.2% to Frontier at 74.6%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. SkyWest Airlines arrives on time 87.2% of the time; Frontier Airlines manages 74.6%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 488 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on LAX to PHX
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlines	2,590	87.2%	59 min	0.73%	A+
United Airlinesthin sample	339	86.6%	74 min	0.59%	A+
Envoy Airthin sample	6	83.3%	22 min	0.00%	B+
Delta Air Lines (this page)thin sample	142	83.0%	77 min	0.70%	B+
American Airlines	2,026	79.1%	91 min	0.49%	B+
Southwest Airlines	2,017	74.9%	51 min	1.09%	C
Frontier Airlines	488	74.6%	72 min	1.43%	C

The spread between SkyWest and Frontier is 13 points, wide enough that it should decide the booking. On a hundred trips that is 13 more arrivals inside the on-time window.

Departure window

When Delta 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 142 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Delta's LAX to PHX record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 83.0% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Delta on LAX to PHX through the year

Oct–Dec 202576 flights86.8%
Jan–Mar 202662 flights78.7%
Apr–Jun 20264 flights—

Scale runs 70% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 83.0% on time across 142 flights.

Split by quarter, Delta on LAX to PHX logged 76 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 62 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 4 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 83.0% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why Delta runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 77% of the 1,844 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
77%
Late-arriving aircraft
16%
National Airspace System
6%
Extreme weather
2%

The largest share of delay minutes, 77%, 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 1,415 of the 1,844 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 1,844 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations are rare at 0.70%, 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

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.3% 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 370 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 8pm–5am window matters as much as it does.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 95.0% on time across 142 flights, 12 points above 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 12 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 142 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 Delta on LAX to PHX

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 142 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 83.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 141 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