Carrier route record
WNOKC→DEN
Southwest Airlines · Oklahoma City to Denver
- Flights
- 1,223
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 39%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on OKC to DEN lands a B+, level with the national rate of 77.6%. Roughly one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 1,223 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, SkyWest Airlines, flew 1,262 at 81.9% on time.
The US average over the same twelve months is 77.6%, so there is little to separate Southwest on OKC to DEN from the country as a whole. The variation that matters here is internal: which carrier, and what time of day.
Key figures
On time
78.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,211 completed flights
Avg delay
57 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.98%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
79.2%
Every carrier on OKC to DEN, 3,167 flights
These figures cover 1,223 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 3 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 OKC to DEN
Southwest flew 1,223 of the 3,167 flights on OKC to DEN, about 39% of it. Its 78.0% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 79.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 81.9% to United at 75.2%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 5 points separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines | 1,262 | 81.9% | 75 min | 0.63% | B+ |
| Southwest Airlines (this page) | 1,223 | 78.0% | 57 min | 0.98% | B+ |
| Frontier Airlines | 366 | 77.1% | 77 min | 0.82% | B+ |
| United Airlinesthin sample | 316 | 75.2% | 37 min | 0.63% | B+ |
No carrier stands out. SkyWest tops the table at 81.9%, 5 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Departure window
When Southwest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 39 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am358 flights94.6%
- 8am–11am126 flights84.0%
- 11am–2pm240 flights82.8%
- 2pm–5pm114 flights55.4%
- 5pm–8pm280 flights60.6%
- 8pm–5am105 flights74.0%
Scale runs 45% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 94.6% of the time, against 55.4% for the afternoon window. That is 39 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 358 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on OKC to DEN through the year
August is the worst month at 66.4% on time, 25 points below February, the best at 91.2%. 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. July was the busiest month here, with 119 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 80.6% on time and Saturday the weakest at 75.3%. 5 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Southwest runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. National Airspace System accounts for 44% of the 15,000 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.
- 44%National Airspace System
- 41%Late-arriving aircraft
- 13%Carrier
- 3%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
41% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. That is a cascade, and cascades start small and grow through the day. Across 15,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 16 to one. It is the strongest argument for booking the first departure of the morning, when the aircraft has been sitting at the gate overnight with nothing to inherit. The split is drawn from 15,019 reported delay minutes.
44% 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 6,574 minutes out of 15,000, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations sit at 0.98% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
6.6% 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 about an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 495 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 70.9% on time across 1,223 flights, 7 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 7 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,223 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 Southwest on OKC to DEN
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. February runs 91.2% on time and August 66.4%, a swing of 25 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of August before you think about anything else. 1,211 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- OKC to DEN, every carrier
- Southwest on DEN to OKC, the return leg
- SkyWest Airlines on OKC to DEN81.9%
- Frontier Airlines on OKC to DEN77.1%
- United Airlines on OKC to DEN75.2%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.