Carrier route record
ASPDX→PHX
Alaska Airlines · Portland to Phoenix
- Flights
- 1,375
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 37%
- Carriers
- 6
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Alaska Airlines.
Alaska on PDX to PHX lands a B+, 6 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by roughly 50 minutes on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 1,375 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 869 at 79.3% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Alaska's PDX to PHX record is 6 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 62 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
83.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,367 completed flights
Avg delay
48 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.44%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
80.0%
Every carrier on PDX to PHX, 3,733 flights
These figures cover 1,375 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 6 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
Alaska against every carrier on PDX to PHX
Alaska flew 1,375 of the 3,733 flights on PDX to PHX, about 37% of it. Its 83.8% on time is 4 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 80.0%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of six carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 90.7% to Southwest at 75.5%. Three 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 86 | 90.7% | 151 min | 0.00% | A+ |
| Alaska Airlines (this page) | 1,375 | 83.8% | 48 min | 0.44% | B+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 94 | 80.4% | 122 min | 1.06% | B |
| Envoy Airthin sample | 35 | 80.0% | 45 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| American Airlines | 869 | 79.3% | 129 min | 1.04% | B |
| Southwest Airlines | 1,274 | 75.5% | 50 min | 0.16% | B+ |
No carrier stands out. American tops the table at 79.3%, 4 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Departure window
When Alaska runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 24 points, against 4 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am354 flights86.3%
- 8am–11am222 flights91.9%
- 11am–2pm31 flights67.7%
- 2pm–5pm303 flights85.8%
- 5pm–8pm347 flights77.9%
- 8pm–5am118 flights78.0%
Scale runs 60% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 67.7% on time against 91.9% for 8am–11am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 354 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Alaska on PDX to PHX through the year
May is the best month on the calendar at 95.5% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. March was the busiest month here, with 176 flights.
Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 87.1% on time and Friday the weakest at 78.0%. 9 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Alaska 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 11,000 reported delay minutes.
- 37%Carrier
- 36%National Airspace System
- 26%Late-arriving aircraft
- 1%Security
- 0%Extreme weather
36% 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 3,836 minutes out of 11,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 10,682 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 37%, 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 3,985 of the 11,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.44%, 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 3.4% 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.
The 1,010 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 87.9% on time across 1,372 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,375 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 Alaska on PDX to PHX
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. May runs 95.5% on time and November 66.7%, a swing of 29 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of November before you think about anything else. 1,367 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- PDX to PHX, every carrier
- Alaska on PHX to PDX, the return leg
- American Airlines on PDX to PHX79.3%
- Southwest Airlines on PDX to PHX75.5%
- Alaska Airlines network-wide record
- Portland International (PDX) delay statistics
- Phoenix Sky Harbor International (PHX) delay statistics
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
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.