Carrier route record

OOLAX→RNO

SkyWest Airlines · Los Angeles to Reno

Flights: 2,037
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 82%
Carriers: 3

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

SkyWest on LAX to RNO 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 13 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 2,037 flights, with a median arrival 12 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's LAX to RNO record is 13 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 132 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

90.8%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,027 completed flights

Avg delay

65 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.34%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

88.1%

Every carrier on LAX to RNO, 2,494 flights

These figures cover 2,037 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 12 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 RNO

SkyWest flew 2,037 of the 2,494 flights on LAX to RNO, most of the route. Its 90.8% on time is 3 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 88.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 90.8% to Southwest at 71.7%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

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.

On-time performance by carrier on LAX to RNO
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	2,037	90.8%	65 min	0.34%	A+
United Airlinesthin sample	114	89.5%	45 min	0.00%	A+
Southwest Airlinesthin sample	343	71.7%	48 min	1.17%	C

Flight by flight

SkyWest flight numbers on LAX to RNO

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 2,037 flights.

5am–8am—
8am–11am692 flights94.8%
11am–2pm136 flights86.7%
2pm–5pm440 flights90.6%
5pm–8pm232 flights88.3%
8pm–5am537 flights87.9%

Scale runs 80% to 100%. 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 86.7% on time against 94.8% 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 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 692 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on LAX to RNO through the year

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

July is the worst month at 86.8% on time, 10 points below September, the best at 96.6%. 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. August was the busiest month here, with 213 flights.

Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 93.4% on time and Sunday the weakest at 87.8%. 6 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 60% of the 12,000 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
60%
Extreme weather
19%
Late-arriving aircraft
15%
National Airspace System
6%

Extreme weather accounts for 19% 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 3.0 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 12,198 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 60%, 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 7,333 of the 12,000 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.34%, 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 2.9% 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 390 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 8am–11am window matters as much as it does.

The return leg runs 88.8% on time across 2,037 flights, within 2 points of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.

The sample behind these figures is 2,037 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 RNO

Put together: take the 8am–11am departure, avoid July if the dates are flexible, and if two carriers are within a few dollars of each other, the top row of the table is the one with the record behind it. None of that guarantees an on-time arrival; it moves the odds by 8 points, which is the most any booking decision can do. 2,027 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