Carrier route record

OOLAX→SAN

SkyWest Airlines · Los Angeles to San Diego

Flights: 2,253
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 92%
Carriers: 2

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

SkyWest on LAX to SAN earns an A. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 9 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 2,253 flights, with a median arrival 7 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's LAX to SAN record is 9 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 89 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

86.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,230 completed flights

Avg delay

65 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.02%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

86.7%

Every carrier on LAX to SAN, 2,441 flights

These figures cover 2,253 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 7 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 SAN

SkyWest flew 2,253 of the 2,441 flights on LAX to SAN, most of the route. Its 86.5% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 86.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 89.4% to SkyWest at 86.5%. One 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 SAN
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
United Airlinesthin sample	188	89.4%	46 min	0.00%	A+
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	2,253	86.5%	65 min	1.02%	A

Flight by flight

SkyWest flight numbers on LAX to SAN

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 2,253 flights.

5am–8am1 flights—
8am–11am713 flights87.3%
11am–2pm86 flights83.7%
2pm–5pm334 flights85.3%
5pm–8pm562 flights84.5%
8pm–5am557 flights88.4%

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

The overnight block holds up unusually well at 88.4% on time across 557 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 713 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on LAX to SAN through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.April best, December worst

December is the weak month at 77.4% on time, against 93.6% in April. 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 209 flights.

Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 92.5% on time and Friday the weakest at 81.2%. 11 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 46% of the 20,000 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
46%
National Airspace System
25%
Extreme weather
20%
Late-arriving aircraft
9%

Extreme weather accounts for 20% 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 3.1 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 19,657 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 46%, 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 8,989 of the 20,000 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations sit at 1.02% 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 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 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 runs 89.0% on time across 2,254 flights, within 3 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 2,253 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 SAN

Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. April runs 93.6% on time and December 77.4%, a swing of 16 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 2,230 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