Carrier route record

ASPDX→SMF

Alaska Airlines · Portland to Sacramento

Flights: 328
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 16%
Carriers: 3

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Alaska Airlines.

Alaska on PDX to SMF earns an A+. Nearly every flight arrives inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 16 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about 40 minutes. That rests on 328 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, SkyWest Airlines, flew 456 at 84.6% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Alaska's PDX to SMF record is 16 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 162 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

93.8%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 325 completed flights

Avg delay

40 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.91%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

82.4%

Every carrier on PDX to SMF, 1,989 flights

These figures cover 328 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 9 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 SMF

Alaska flew 328 of the 1,989 flights on PDX to SMF, about 16% of it. Its 93.8% on time is 11 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 82.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Alaska at 93.8% to Southwest at 78.5%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. SkyWest Airlines arrives on time 84.6% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 78.5%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,205 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on PDX to SMF
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Alaska Airlines (this page)thin sample	328	93.8%	40 min	0.91%	A+
SkyWest Airlines	456	84.6%	59 min	0.22%	B+
Southwest Airlines	1,205	78.5%	51 min	0.17%	B+

SkyWest leads Southwest by 6 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.

Departure window

When Alaska runs best on this route

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 328 flights.

5am–8am56 flights98.2%
8am–11am91 flights93.3%
11am–2pm15 flights—
2pm–5pm81 flights95.1%
5pm–8pm84 flights91.7%
8pm–5am1 flights—

Scale runs 85% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The early departures do better, though not dramatically: 98.2% on time for the 5am–8am window against 91.7% for 5pm–8pm. Worth taking if the schedule allows, not worth an extra connection. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 91 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Alaska on PDX to SMF through the year

Oct–Dec 202515 flights—
Jan–Mar 2026155 flights93.5%
Apr–Jun 2026158 flights94.9%

Scale runs 85% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 93.8% on time across 328 flights.

Split by quarter, Alaska on PDX to SMF logged 15 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 155 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 158 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 93.8% annual figure is the one to use.

Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 100.0% on time and Thursday the weakest at 89.1%. 11 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Alaska runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 65% of the 806 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.

Late-arriving aircraft
65%
Carrier
28%
National Airspace System
7%

65% 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 806 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 65 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 806 reported delay minutes.

The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 98.2% on time here.

Cancellations sit at 0.91% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 0.9% 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 479 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 90.1% on time across 328 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 328 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 Alaska on PDX to SMF

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 328 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 93.8% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 325 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

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.

Key figures