Route reliability record
LAX→SAN
Los Angeles to San Diego
- Flights
- 2,452
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Distance
- 109 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route lands a B+, 6 points better than the national rate of 77.3%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about an hour on average. That rests on 2,452 LAX to SAN flights, with a median arrival 6 minutes early.
Best time to fly LAX to SAN: a 8pm–5am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 87.1% of the time and Tuesday flights 92.4%, against 83.2% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 6 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 59 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
83.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,429 completed flights
Avg delay
60 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.94%
National rate is 1.89%
Best carrier
SkyWest
83.9% on time across 2,162 flights
These figures cover 2,452 flights between September 2025 and August 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.
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Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on LAX to SAN
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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines | 2,162 | 83.9% | 62 min | 1.06% | B |
| United Airlinesthin sample | 290 | 77.6% | 49 min | 0.00% | B+ |
Flight by flight
Flights on LAX to SAN
The flight numbers below flew this route at least 250 times in the period, busiest first. Each has its own record, with its schedule and delay causes.
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Departure window
The best time of day to leave
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 2,452 flights.
- 5am–8am5 flights—
- 8am–11am709 flights84.2%
- 11am–2pm72 flights83.3%
- 2pm–5pm367 flights78.4%
- 5pm–8pm654 flights80.8%
- 8pm–5am645 flights87.1%
Scale runs 70% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The overnight block holds up unusually well at 87.1% on time across 645 flights. Red-eyes fly into empty airspace and empty gates, and they are the first rotation of the aircraft's day rather than the last. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 709 flights scheduled in it.
Explore
Filter LAX to SAN by airline, time, month and day
Pick a breakdown and a carrier. The dashed mark on each row is the same slice for every US flight.
On LAX to SAN, the best departure window is 8pm–5am at 87.1% on time and the worst is 2pm–5pm at 78.4%, a real gap of 8.7 points. All US flights leaving 8pm–5am ran 70.1%.
- 5–8am—
- 8–11am84.2%
- 11am–2pm83.3%
- 2–5pm78.4%
- 5–8pm80.8%
- 8pm–5am87.1%
best all US flightsScale 60% to 95%. Cells under 30 flights show a dash.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 28 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
August is the worst month at 65.7% on time, 28 points below April, the best at 93.2%. 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. May was the busiest month here, with 224 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 92.4% on time and Sunday the weakest at 77.7%, a spread of 15 points.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
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 25,000 reported delay minutes.
- 40%Carrier
- 32%National Airspace System
- 16%Extreme weather
- 12%Late-arriving aircraft
Extreme weather accounts for 16% 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 2.6 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 24,548 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 40%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 9,792 of the 25,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations sit at 0.94% against a national 1.89%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.4% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% 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 109 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 87.4% on time across 2,452 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 2,452 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in SAN after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. April runs 93.2% on time and August 65.7%, a swing of 28 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of August before you think about anything else. 2,429 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
LAX to SAN questions
How often is LAX to SAN delayed?
About one flight in six arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 16.8% of the 2,452 flights in this analysis, against 22.7% nationally. Delayed flights are late by about an hour on average.
How reliable is LAX to SAN compared with the rest of the country?
83.2% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.3%, a difference of 6 points in its favour. That is worth a B+ on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on LAX to SAN?
The 8pm–5am departure window is the strongest at 87.1% on time. The 2pm–5pm window is the weakest at 78.4%, 9 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are August delays on LAX to SAN?
August is the weakest month at 65.7% on time, compared with 93.2% in April. Across the year that is 28 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- SAN to LAX — the return legseparate record
- Los Angeles International (LAX) delay statistics
- San Diego International (SAN) delay statistics
- SkyWest Airlines on LAX to SAN83.9%
- United Airlines on LAX to SAN77.6%
- LAX to SFO, a related route60.1%
- SFO to SAN, a related route62.2%
- LAX to JFK, a related route77.5%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record83.9%
- United Airlines on-time record77.6%
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.05 million flight records
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
Direction matters. LAX to SAN and SAN to LAX are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.