Carrier route record

WNMAF→DEN

Southwest Airlines · Midland to Denver

Flights: 265
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 18%
Carriers: 2

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

Southwest on MAF to DEN earns an A+. Nearly every flight arrives inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 18 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 265 flights, with a median arrival 11 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, Southwest's MAF to DEN record is 18 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 178 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

95.4%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 263 completed flights

Avg delay

66 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.75%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

81.7%

Every carrier on MAF to DEN, 1,463 flights

These figures cover 265 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 11 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

Southwest against every carrier on MAF to DEN

Southwest flew 265 of the 1,463 flights on MAF to DEN, about 18% of it. Its 95.4% on time is 14 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 81.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 95.4% to SkyWest at 78.7%.

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 MAF to DEN
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Southwest Airlines (this page)thin sample	265	95.4%	66 min	0.75%	A+
SkyWest Airlines	1,198	78.7%	89 min	1.17%	B

Departure window

When Southwest 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 265 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Southwest's MAF to DEN record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 95.4% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Southwest on MAF to DEN through the year

Jul–Sep 202564 flights87.5%
Oct–Dec 202549 flights95.9%
Jan–Mar 202661 flights100.0%
Apr–Jun 202691 flights97.8%

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

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 95.4% on time across 265 flights.

Southwest on MAF to DEN did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jan–Mar 2026 at 100.0% on time and its weakest Jul–Sep 2025 at 87.5%, a swing of 13 points on roughly 66 flights a quarter. The twelve-month rate averages over that, so if you are flying in a weak quarter the quarter's own figure is the better guide.

Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 100.0% on time and Monday the weakest at 86.7%. 13 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Southwest runs late on this route

Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 797 reported delay minutes.

Carrier
40%
Late-arriving aircraft
24%
Extreme weather
21%
National Airspace System
15%

Extreme weather accounts for 21% 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 3.4 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 797 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 40%, 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 321 of the 797 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.75%, 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 1.9% 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 563 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 is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 59.4% on time across 265 flights, 36 points below 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 36 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 265 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 Southwest on MAF to DEN

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 265 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 95.4% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 263 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