Carrier route record
OOPDX→LAX
SkyWest Airlines · Portland to Los Angeles
- Flights
- 599
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 14%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on PDX to LAX lands a B+, 3 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by close to two hours on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 599 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 1,689 at 90.9% on time.
The US average over the same twelve months is 77.6%, so there is little to separate SkyWest on PDX to LAX from the country as a whole. The variation that matters here is internal: which carrier, and what time of day.
Key figures
On time
81.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 596 completed flights
Avg delay
117 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.33%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
87.4%
Every carrier on PDX to LAX, 4,403 flights
These figures cover 599 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 10.2% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.
Carrier by carrier
SkyWest against every carrier on PDX to LAX
SkyWest flew 599 of the 4,403 flights on PDX to LAX, about 14% of it. Its 81.0% on time is 6 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 87.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 90.9% to SkyWest at 81.0%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 4 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delta Air Lines | 1,689 | 90.9% | 108 min | 0.89% | A+ |
| Alaska Airlines | 1,897 | 86.5% | 49 min | 0.84% | A+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 218 | 84.9% | 52 min | 2.75% | B |
| SkyWest Airlines (this page) | 599 | 81.0% | 117 min | 0.33% | B+ |
No carrier stands out. Delta tops the table at 90.9%, 4 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Flight by flight
SkyWest flight numbers on PDX to LAX
Departure window
When SkyWest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 16 points, against 4 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am280 flights84.5%
- 8am–11am31 flights90.3%
- 11am–2pm30 flights86.7%
- 2pm–5pm129 flights77.5%
- 5pm–8pm128 flights74.2%
- 8pm–5am1 flights—
Scale runs 65% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 90.3% of the time, against 74.2% for the evening window. That is 16 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 280 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
SkyWest on PDX to LAX through the year
December is the weak month at 70.8% on time, against 92.0% in July. 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. August was the busiest month here, with 59 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 86.1% on time and Thursday the weakest at 78.0%. 8 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 75% of the 13,000 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.
- 75%Carrier
- 18%Late-arriving aircraft
- 4%National Airspace System
- 3%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
The largest share of delay minutes, 75%, 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 9,913 of the 13,000 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 13,221 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations are rare at 0.33%, 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
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 10.2% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
The 833 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 76.2% on time across 599 flights, 5 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 5 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 599 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 SkyWest on PDX to LAX
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 599 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 81.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 596 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- PDX to LAX, every carrier
- SkyWest on LAX to PDX, the return leg
- Delta Air Lines on PDX to LAX90.9%
- Alaska Airlines on PDX to LAX86.5%
- Frontier Airlines on PDX to LAX84.9%
- SkyWest Airlines network-wide record
- Portland International (PDX) delay statistics
- Los Angeles International (LAX) delay statistics
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
- 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.