Carrier route record
ASLAX→SFO
Alaska Airlines · Los Angeles to San Francisco
- Flights
- 686
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 6%
- Carriers
- 7
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Alaska Airlines.
Alaska on LAX to SFO earns an F+, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 52.3% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 25 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average about an hour. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 686 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, SkyWest Airlines, flew 2,593 at 72.0% on time.
SkyWest Airlines is the most reliable of the five carriers covered here at 72.0% on time across 2,593 flights.
Key figures
On time
52.3%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 683 completed flights
Avg delay
55 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.44%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
64.8%
Every carrier on LAX to SFO, 11,013 flights
These figures cover 686 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 16.3% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.
Carrier by carrier
Alaska against every carrier on LAX to SFO
Alaska flew 686 of the 11,013 flights on LAX to SFO, about 6% of it. Its 52.3% on time is 13 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 64.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of seven carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 72.0% to Alaska at 52.3%. One 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 72.0% of the time; Frontier Airlines manages 53.3%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 391 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines | 2,593 | 72.0% | 59 min | 1.16% | C |
| United Airlines | 3,257 | 66.3% | 57 min | 0.25% | C+ |
| Delta Air Lines | 2,373 | 65.2% | 55 min | 1.52% | C |
| American Airlinesthin sample | 343 | 61.3% | 74 min | 0.29% | D+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 1,370 | 57.1% | 61 min | 0.36% | D+ |
| Frontier Airlines | 391 | 53.3% | 72 min | 2.05% | F |
| Alaska Airlines (this page) | 686 | 52.3% | 55 min | 0.44% | F+ |
The spread between SkyWest and Frontier is 19 points, wide enough that it should decide the booking. On a hundred trips that is 19 more arrivals inside the on-time window.
Departure window
When Alaska runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 62 points, against 19 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am95 flights93.7%
- 8am–11am144 flights33.8%
- 11am–2pm98 flights46.9%
- 2pm–5pm105 flights57.1%
- 5pm–8pm108 flights31.5%
- 8pm–5am136 flights59.3%
Scale runs 25% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 31.5% on time, against 93.7% for the 5am–8am slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 144 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Alaska on LAX to SFO through the year
- Oct–Dec 202525 flights—
- Jan–Mar 2026126 flights84.1%
- Apr–Jun 2026535 flights44.5%
Scale runs 35% 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 52.3% on time across 686 flights.
Split by quarter, Alaska on LAX to SFO logged 25 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 126 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 535 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 52.3% annual figure is the one to use.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 62.8% on time and Monday the weakest at 48.1%. 15 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Alaska runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. National Airspace System accounts for 71% of the 18,000 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.
- 71%National Airspace System
- 14%Late-arriving aircraft
- 13%Carrier
- 1%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
71% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 13,000 minutes out of 18,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 17,942 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations are rare at 0.44%, 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
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 16.3% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
At 337 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 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 69.7% on time across 685 flights, 17 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 17 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 686 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 Alaska on LAX to SFO
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 686 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 52.3% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 683 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- LAX to SFO, every carrier
- Alaska on SFO to LAX, the return leg
- SkyWest Airlines on LAX to SFO72.0%
- United Airlines on LAX to SFO66.3%
- Delta Air Lines on LAX to SFO65.2%
- American Airlines on LAX to SFO61.3%
- Southwest Airlines on LAX to SFO57.1%
- Frontier Airlines on LAX to SFO53.3%
- Alaska Airlines network-wide record
- Los Angeles International (LAX) delay statistics
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.