Carrier route record

OOLAX→SJC

SkyWest Airlines · Los Angeles to San Jose

Flights: 2,049
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 46%
Carriers: 6

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

SkyWest on LAX to SJC 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 14 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 2,049 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 455 at 86.4% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's LAX to SJC record is 14 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 138 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

91.4%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,042 completed flights

Avg delay

55 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.34%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

86.6%

Every carrier on LAX to SJC, 4,429 flights

These figures cover 2,049 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 SJC

SkyWest flew 2,049 of the 4,429 flights on LAX to SJC, about 46% of it. Its 91.4% on time is 5 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 86.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of six carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 100.0% to American at 66.7%. Three of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The two 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 SJC
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
United Airlinesthin sample	1	100.0%	—	0.00%	A+
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	2,049	91.4%	55 min	0.34%	A+
Delta Air Lines	455	86.4%	61 min	2.86%	A
Southwest Airlines	1,822	81.5%	48 min	0.66%	B+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	96	80.6%	53 min	3.12%	B−
American Airlinesthin sample	6	66.7%	39 min	0.00%	C+

No carrier stands out. Delta tops the table at 86.4%, 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 SJC

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 2,049 flights.

5am–8am167 flights94.5%
8am–11am246 flights95.5%
11am–2pm612 flights92.6%
2pm–5pm239 flights88.7%
5pm–8pm430 flights90.7%
8pm–5am355 flights87.5%

Scale runs 80% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 95.5% of the time, against 87.5% for the overnight window. That is 8 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 612 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on LAX to SJC through the year

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

December is the weak month at 83.8% on time, against 95.8% in November. 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. September was the busiest month here, with 270 flights.

Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 94.4% on time and Friday the weakest at 87.6%. 7 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 64% of the 9,739 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
64%
Extreme weather
16%
Late-arriving aircraft
11%
National Airspace System
10%

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 2.5 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 9,739 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 64%, 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 6,192 of the 9,739 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 2.6% 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 308 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 92.6% on time across 2,053 flights, within about a point 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 2,049 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 SJC

Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. November runs 95.8% on time and December 83.8%, a swing of 12 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 2,042 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