Route reliability record
OAK→SAN
Oakland to San Diego
- Flights
- 3,278
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Distance
- 446 mi
- Carriers
- 3
This route draws a D+. Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is about 50 minutes behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 3,278 OAK to SAN flights, with a median arrival 6 minutes late.
Best time to fly OAK to SAN: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Saturday. Flights in that window arrived on time 91.1% of the time and Saturday flights 77.5%, against 62.7% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so this route runs 15 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 146 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
62.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 3,242 completed flights
Avg delay
49 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.98%
National rate is 1.89%
Best carrier
Southwest
62.5% on time across 2,913 flights
These figures cover 3,278 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.4% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on OAK to SAN
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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spirit Airlinesthin sample | 20 | 95.0% | 34 min | 0.00% | A+ |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 345 | 62.6% | 49 min | 1.45% | D |
| Southwest Airlines | 2,913 | 62.5% | 49 min | 0.93% | D+ |
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Best ways to make this trip
The most reliable ways to fly Oakland to San Diego
Every airline on this route and on the routes between nearby airports, ranked by how often a scheduled flight actually operated and arrived on time. 4 of the top 5 use a different airport at one end.
| Option | Airline | Success | On time | Cancelled | Best departure | Most punctual flight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. SFO → SANSan Francisco to San Diego | United Airlines | 72.6% | 72.8% | 0.34% | 5am–8am, Sat | UA 2177 10:05 |
| 2. SJC → SANSan Jose to San Diego | SkyWest Airlines | 72.0% | 73.0% | 1.39% | 5am–8am, Sat | OO 3499 09:09 |
| 3. SJC → SANSan Jose to San Diego | Southwest Airlines | 65.9% | 66.5% | 0.96% | 5am–8am, Tue | — |
| 4. OAK → SANOakland to San Diego | Southwest Airlines | 61.9% | 62.5% | 0.93% | 5am–8am, Sat | — |
| 5. SFO → SANSan Francisco to San Diego | SkyWest Airlines | 58.7% | 60.1% | 2.36% | 5am–8am, Sat | — |
Success is the share of scheduled flights that operated and arrived less than 15 minutes late, so a cancelled flight counts against it. “(route)” means the best time comes from every carrier on the route rather than this airline alone.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 48 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier.
- 5am–8am563 flights91.1%
- 8am–11am702 flights70.7%
- 11am–2pm519 flights61.9%
- 2pm–5pm739 flights52.5%
- 5pm–8pm453 flights43.1%
- 8pm–5am302 flights47.3%
Scale runs 35% to 95%.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 43.1% on time, against 91.1% for the 5am–8am slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 739 flights scheduled in it.
Explore
Filter OAK to SAN by airline, time, month and day
Pick a breakdown and a carrier. The dashed mark on each row is the same slice for every US flight.
On OAK to SAN, the best departure window is 5am–8am at 91.1% on time and the worst is 5pm–8pm at 43.1%, a wide gap of 48.0 points. All US flights leaving 5am–8am ran 89.3%.
- 5–8am91.1%
- 8–11am70.7%
- 11am–2pm61.9%
- 2–5pm52.5%
- 5–8pm43.1%
- 8pm–5am47.3%
best all US flightsScale 35% to 95%.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 31 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
August is the worst month at 45.9% on time, 31 points below January, the best at 77.2%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. August was the busiest month here, with 346 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 77.5% on time and Friday the weakest at 52.1%, a spread of 25 points.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
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 59,000 reported delay minutes.
- 40%Late-arriving aircraft
- 35%National Airspace System
- 24%Carrier
- 1%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
40% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 59,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 40 to one. The split is drawn from 59,308 reported delay minutes.
35% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 21,000 minutes out of 59,000, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations sit at 0.98% against a national 1.89%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.12%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
9.4% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
At 446 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 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 72.9% on time across 3,290 flights, 10 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 10 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 3,278 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in SAN after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. January runs 77.2% on time and August 45.9%, a swing of 31 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of August before you think about anything else. 3,242 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
OAK to SAN questions
How often is OAK to SAN delayed?
Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 37.3% of the 3,278 flights in this analysis, against 22.7% nationally. Delayed flights are late by about 50 minutes on average.
How reliable is OAK to SAN compared with the rest of the country?
62.7% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.3%, a difference of 15 points against it. That is worth a D+ on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on OAK to SAN?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 91.1% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 43.1%, 48 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are August delays on OAK to SAN?
August is the weakest month at 45.9% on time, compared with 77.2% in January. Across the year that is 31 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- SAN to OAK — the return legseparate record
- Oakland International (OAK) delay statistics
- San Diego International (SAN) delay statistics
- SkyWest Airlines on OAK to SAN62.6%
- Southwest Airlines on OAK to SAN62.5%
- OAK to LAS, a related route76.5%
- SFO to SAN, a related route62.2%
- OAK to BUR, a related route81.9%
- Spirit Airlines on-time record95.0%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record62.6%
- Southwest Airlines on-time record62.5%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.05 million flight records
Direction matters. OAK to SAN and SAN to OAK are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.