Carrier route record

OOLAX→SLC

SkyWest Airlines · Los Angeles to Salt Lake City

Flights: 691
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 17%
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 SLC 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 12 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs an hour and a half. That rests on 691 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 2,451 at 88.5% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's LAX to SLC record is 12 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 120 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

89.6%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 690 completed flights

Avg delay

87 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.00%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

87.7%

Every carrier on LAX to SLC, 4,144 flights

These figures cover 691 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 10 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 SLC

SkyWest flew 691 of the 4,144 flights on LAX to SLC, about 17% of it. Its 89.6% on time is 2 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 87.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of six carriers on the route, where the range runs from Spirit at 90.9% to Southwest at 81.7%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Delta Air Lines arrives on time 88.5% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 81.7%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 374 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on LAX to SLC
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Spirit Airlinesthin sample	23	90.9%	29 min	4.35%	A−
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	691	89.6%	87 min	0.00%	A+
United Airlinesthin sample	149	88.6%	65 min	0.00%	A+
Delta Air Lines	2,451	88.5%	79 min	0.41%	A+
Frontier Airlines	456	85.2%	76 min	0.88%	A+
Southwest Airlines	374	81.7%	46 min	0.53%	B+

Delta leads Southwest by 7 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.

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 691 flights.

5am–8am—
8am–11am209 flights86.1%
11am–2pm193 flights92.2%
2pm–5pm61 flights91.8%
5pm–8pm205 flights92.2%
8pm–5am23 flights—

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

The best window here is not the first bank but the 11am–2pm slot at 92.2% on time, ahead of 8am–11am at 86.1%. Where the curve peaks mid-day rather than at dawn, the constraint is usually congestion at one end rather than the aircraft's own rotation. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 209 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on LAX to SLC through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.October best, January worst

January is the weak month at 77.6% on time, against 96.7% in October. 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. March was the busiest month here, with 91 flights.

Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 93.3% on time and Sunday the weakest at 84.6%. 9 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 53% of the 6,253 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
53%
Late-arriving aircraft
37%
Extreme weather
6%
National Airspace System
4%

37% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. That is a cascade, and cascades start small and grow through the day. Across 6,253 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 6 to one. It is the strongest argument for booking the first departure of the morning, when the aircraft has been sitting at the gate overnight with nothing to inherit. The split is drawn from 6,253 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 53%, 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 3,299 of the 6,253 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.00%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Almost no flights are 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 4.5% 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.

The 590 miles between these two airports put this in the middle of the US network, around two and a half to three hours of block time. That is enough cruise to absorb a ten-minute late pushback and not enough to absorb thirty. It is also long enough that the aircraft usually flies three or four legs a day rather than six, which slows how fast delay compounds.

The return leg runs 89.6% on time across 691 flights, within half a point of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 691 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 SkyWest on LAX to SLC

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 691 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 89.6% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 690 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