Carrier route record

OOLAX→TUS

SkyWest Airlines · Los Angeles to Tucson

Flights: 2,114
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 82%
Carriers: 2

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

SkyWest on LAX to TUS lands a B+, 6 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by an hour and a half on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 2,114 flights, with a median arrival 9 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's LAX to TUS record is 6 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 55 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

83.1%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,103 completed flights

Avg delay

84 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.43%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

80.4%

Every carrier on LAX to TUS, 2,580 flights

These figures cover 2,114 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 9 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 TUS

SkyWest flew 2,114 of the 2,580 flights on LAX to TUS, most of the route. Its 83.1% on time is 3 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 80.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 83.1% to Southwest at 68.2%.

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 TUS
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	2,114	83.1%	84 min	0.43%	B+
Southwest Airlines	466	68.2%	49 min	0.21%	C+

Flight by flight

SkyWest flight numbers on LAX to TUS

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 2,114 flights.

5am–8am—
8am–11am728 flights86.7%
11am–2pm1 flights—
2pm–5pm704 flights79.4%
5pm–8pm622 flights82.8%
8pm–5am59 flights84.7%

Scale runs 70% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The early departures do better, though not dramatically: 86.7% on time for the 8am–11am window against 79.4% for 2pm–5pm. Worth taking if the schedule allows, not worth an extra connection. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 728 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on LAX to TUS through the year

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

April is the best month on the calendar at 90.5% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. May was the busiest month here, with 186 flights.

Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 89.0% on time and Sunday the weakest at 76.1%. 13 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 59% of the 30,000 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
59%
Late-arriving aircraft
22%
Extreme weather
15%
National Airspace System
5%

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 2.3 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 29,786 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 59%, 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 30,000 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

7.7% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last an hour and a half, which a normal layover absorbs.

At 451 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 is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 86.5% on time across 2,115 flights, 3 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 3 points of difference.

The sample behind these figures is 2,114 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 TUS

Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. April runs 90.5% on time and October 78.0%, a swing of 13 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of October before you think about anything else. 2,103 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