Route reliability record
PDX→GEG
Portland to Spokane
- Flights
- 964
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 279 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route earns an A+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 9 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs roughly 45 minutes. That rests on 964 PDX to GEG flights, of which SkyWest Airlines flew 415 at 86.5% on time.
Best time to fly PDX to GEG: a 2pm–5pm departure, ideally on a Saturday. Flights in that window arrived on time 88.5% of the time and Saturday flights 90.2%, against 86.3% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 9 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 87 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
86.3%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 955 completed flights
Avg delay
43 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.93%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
86.5% on time across 415 flights
These figures cover 964 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 4 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
Which airline is most reliable on PDX to GEG
The two carriers here are closely matched: half a point 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 | 415 | 86.5% | 47 min | 0.24% | A+ |
| Alaska Airlines | 549 | 86.1% | 41 min | 1.46% | A |
No carrier stands out. SkyWest tops the table at 86.5%, half a point clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Best ways to make this trip
The most reliable ways to fly Portland to Spokane
Every airline on this route, ranked by how often a scheduled flight actually operated and arrived on time, with its best departure time and most punctual flight number. No nearby airport pair beat these.
| Option | Airline | Success | On time | Cancelled | Best departure | Most punctual flight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. PDX → GEGPortland to Spokane | SkyWest Airlines | 86.3% | 86.5% | 0.24% | 2pm–5pm, Sat | — |
| 2. PDX → GEGPortland to Spokane | Alaska Airlines | 84.8% | 86.1% | 1.46% | 8pm–5am, Tue | — |
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 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 964 flights.
- 5am–8am87 flights86.0%
- 8am–11am298 flights85.4%
- 11am–2pm—
- 2pm–5pm270 flights88.5%
- 5pm–8pm63 flights82.5%
- 8pm–5am246 flights86.0%
Scale runs 75% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The best window here is not the first bank but the 2pm–5pm slot at 88.5% on time, ahead of 5pm–8pm at 82.5%. Where the curve peaks mid-day rather than at dawn, the constraint is usually congestion at one end rather than the aircraft's own rotation. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 298 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 13 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.
January is the weak month at 79.8% on time, against 93.2% in April. 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. December was the busiest month here, with 113 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 90.2% on time and Friday the weakest at 80.3%. 10 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
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 5,681 reported delay minutes.
- 41%Late-arriving aircraft
- 38%Carrier
- 15%National Airspace System
- 6%Extreme weather
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 5,681 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 7 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 5,681 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 38%, 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 2,155 of the 5,681 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations sit at 0.93% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 2.4% 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.
At 279 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 2pm–5pm window matters as much as it does.
The return leg runs 87.2% on time across 962 flights, within about a point of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 964 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in GEG after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 964 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 86.3% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 955 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
PDX to GEG questions
How often is PDX to GEG delayed?
About one flight in seven arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 13.7% of the 964 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by roughly 45 minutes on average.
Which airline is most reliable on PDX to GEG?
SkyWest Airlines leads at 86.5% on time across 415 flights. Alaska Airlines is at the other end on 86.1%, a gap of half a point. Sample size matters as much as the percentage: a rate built from a few hundred flights moves around far more than one built from ten thousand.
What time of day has the fewest delays on PDX to GEG?
The 2pm–5pm departure window is the strongest at 88.5% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 82.5%, 6 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 January delays on PDX to GEG?
January is the weakest month at 79.8% on time, compared with 93.2% in April. Across the year that is 13 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
- GEG to PDX — the return legseparate record
- Portland International (PDX) delay statistics
- SkyWest Airlines on PDX to GEG86.5%
- Alaska Airlines on PDX to GEG86.1%
- PDX to SEA, a related route84.8%
- SEA to GEG, a related route82.5%
- PDX to LAX, a related route87.4%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record86.5%
- Alaska Airlines on-time record86.1%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
Direction matters. PDX to GEG and GEG to PDX 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, July 2025 to June 2026. Last updated 15 September 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.