Carrier route record

OOLAX→SMF

SkyWest Airlines · Los Angeles to Sacramento

Flights: 3,559
Period: September 2025 to August 2026
Share of route: 62%
Carriers: 5

Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 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 77.3%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 3,559 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 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 104 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

87.7%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 3,543 completed flights

Avg delay

76 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.37%

National rate is 1.89%

Whole route

84.8%

Every carrier on LAX to SMF, 5,708 flights

These figures cover 3,559 flights between September 2025 and August 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.

Fare search by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.

Carrier by carrier

SkyWest against every carrier on LAX to SMF

SkyWest flew 3,559 of the 5,708 flights on LAX to SMF, most of the route. Its 87.7% on time is 3 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 84.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 89.1% to Southwest at 79.0%. 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
Delta Air Linesthin sample	55	89.1%	51 min	0.00%	A+
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	3,559	87.7%	76 min	0.37%	A+
United Airlinesthin sample	202	83.6%	42 min	0.00%	B+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	242	81.0%	58 min	2.07%	B
Southwest Airlines	1,650	79.0%	54 min	0.24%	B+

Flight by flight

SkyWest flight numbers on LAX to SMF

Timetable by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.

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 3,559 flights.

5am–8am278 flights89.5%
8am–11am829 flights91.2%
11am–2pm441 flights90.5%
2pm–5pm743 flights86.2%
5pm–8pm563 flights89.0%
8pm–5am705 flights81.6%

Scale runs 75% to 95%.

Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 91.2% 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 829 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, Wednesday is the strongest day at 89.9% on time and Sunday the weakest at 84.6%, a spread of 5 points.

Arrival by arrival

How late SkyWest on LAX to SMF runs when it is late

SkyWest on LAX to SMF often beats the schedule: 1,234 of 3,543 completed flights, 35%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 436 late arrivals split 148 under half an hour, 134 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 154 an hour or more.

15+ min early1,234 flights34.8%
Within 15 min1,873 flights52.9%
15–29 min late148 flights4.2%
30–59 min late134 flights3.8%
1–2 hours late93 flights2.6%
2+ hours late61 flights1.7%

Scale runs 0% to 100%.

Share of 3,543 completed flights by arrival against schedule.

76 of 449 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 17% of them. Only 63 left on time and still arrived late.

The worst days

Worst days for SkyWest on LAX to SMF

The latest arrival of the period was on 13 December 2025, 14 hours 5 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as extreme weather. The five worst days are spread across December, March, January and July, with no single month standing out.

The latest arrivals of SkyWest on LAX to SMF in the period
Date	Arrived late by	Largest filed cause
13 December 2025	14 hours 5 minutes	Extreme weather
2 March 2026	12 hours 31 minutes	Carrier
19 January 2026	11 hours 38 minutes	Extreme weather
8 July 2026	11 hours 5 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
9 July 2026	10 hours 32 minutes	Carrier

Delay causes

Why SkyWest runs late on this route

Carrier accounts for 58% of the 33,000 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.

Carrier
58%
Late-arriving aircraft
21%
Extreme weather
15%
National Airspace System
6%
Security
0%

Extreme weather accounts for 15% 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 2.6 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 33,235 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 58%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 19,000 of the 33,000 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.37%, below the national 1.89% 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 4.3% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% 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 89.9% on time across 3,558 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 3,559 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: take the 8am–11am departure, avoid January if the dates are flexible, and if two carriers are within a few dollars of each other, Southwest is the one with the record behind it. None of that guarantees an on-time arrival; it moves the odds by 10 points, which is the most any booking decision can do. 3,543 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated 22 October 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.

Key figures