Carrier route record

OOLAX→PHX

SkyWest Airlines · Los Angeles to Phoenix

Flights: 2,590
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 34%
Carriers: 7

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

SkyWest on LAX to PHX 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 10 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 2,590 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 2,026 at 79.1% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's LAX to PHX record is 10 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 96 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

87.2%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,569 completed flights

Avg delay

59 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.73%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

80.9%

Every carrier on LAX to PHX, 7,608 flights

These figures cover 2,590 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 8 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 PHX

SkyWest flew 2,590 of the 7,608 flights on LAX to PHX, about 34% of it. Its 87.2% on time is 6 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 80.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of seven carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 87.2% to Frontier at 74.6%. Three of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The three carriers here are closely matched: 5 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.

On-time performance by carrier on LAX to PHX
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	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 Linesthin 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

No carrier stands out. American tops the table at 79.1%, 5 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.

Flight by flight

SkyWest flight numbers on LAX to PHX

Departure window

When SkyWest 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 2,590 flights.

5am–8am221 flights81.0%
8am–11am787 flights87.1%
11am–2pm304 flights89.4%
2pm–5pm448 flights89.2%
5pm–8pm354 flights86.4%
8pm–5am476 flights87.6%

Scale runs 75% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The best window here is not the first bank but the 11am–2pm slot at 89.4% on time, ahead of 5am–8am at 81.0%. Where the curve peaks mid-day rather than at dawn, the constraint is usually congestion at one end rather than the aircraft's own rotation. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 787 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on LAX to PHX through the year

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

Delays peak in March, when the on-time rate falls to 78.6%. July is the strongest month at 92.2%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 14 points. May was the busiest month here, with 252 flights.

Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 91.3% on time and Friday the weakest at 83.7%. 8 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why SkyWest runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 51% of the 19,000 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
51%
National Airspace System
22%
Late-arriving aircraft
13%
Extreme weather
13%
Security
0%

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 19,340 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 51%, 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 9,945 of the 19,000 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.73%, 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 3.9% 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 11am–2pm window matters as much as it does.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 90.2% on time across 2,590 flights, 3 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 3 points of difference.

The sample behind these figures is 2,590 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 SkyWest on LAX to PHX

Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. July runs 92.2% on time and March 78.6%, a swing of 14 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of March before you think about anything else. 2,569 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