Carrier route record

OOLAX→SMF

SkyWest Airlines · Los Angeles to Sacramento

Flights: 3,517
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 62%
Carriers: 5

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

SkyWest on LAX to SMF 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 10 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 3,517 flights, with a median arrival 10 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's LAX to SMF record is 10 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 102 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

87.8%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 3,499 completed flights

Avg delay

74 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.43%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

84.6%

Every carrier on LAX to SMF, 5,634 flights

These figures cover 3,517 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 SMF

SkyWest flew 3,517 of the 5,634 flights on LAX to SMF, most of the route. Its 87.8% on time is 3 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 84.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 87.8% to Delta at 67.0%. Three 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 SMF
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	3,517	87.8%	74 min	0.43%	A+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	204	83.5%	56 min	1.96%	B
United Airlinesthin sample	201	83.5%	42 min	0.00%	B+
Southwest Airlines	1,614	79.0%	53 min	0.19%	B+
Delta Air Linesthin sample	98	67.0%	66 min	1.02%	C

Flight by flight

SkyWest flight numbers on LAX to SMF

Departure window

When SkyWest runs best on this route

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 10 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am229 flights89.9%
8am–11am874 flights91.6%
11am–2pm433 flights89.4%
2pm–5pm763 flights86.2%
5pm–8pm530 flights89.6%
8pm–5am688 flights81.6%

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

Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 91.6% of the time, against 81.6% for the overnight window. That is 10 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 874 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on LAX to SMF through the year

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

January is the weak month at 81.9% on time, against 92.9% in September. 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. October was the busiest month here, with 358 flights.

Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 90.4% on time and Sunday the weakest at 85.5%. 5 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 58% of the 32,000 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
58%
Late-arriving aircraft
19%
Extreme weather
17%
National Airspace System
6%
Security
0%

Extreme weather accounts for 17% 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 2.7 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 31,548 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 58%, 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 18,000 of the 32,000 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.43%, 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 4.1% 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 373 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 90.1% on time across 3,517 flights, within 2 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 3,517 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 SMF

Put together: avoid the 8pm–5am departure. It runs 81.6% on time against 91.6% for the 8am–11am slot, and that 10 points is the largest single thing you control here. Southwest Airlines is the strongest operator if the fares are close. 3,499 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