Carrier route record

OOPHX→ABQ

SkyWest Airlines · Phoenix to Albuquerque

Flights: 685
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 21%
Carriers: 4

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

SkyWest on PHX to ABQ 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 8 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 685 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 559 at 81.6% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's PHX to ABQ record is 8 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 79 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

85.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 681 completed flights

Avg delay

65 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.58%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

79.0%

Every carrier on PHX to ABQ, 3,311 flights

These figures cover 685 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 8 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

SkyWest against every carrier on PHX to ABQ

SkyWest flew 685 of the 3,311 flights on PHX to ABQ, about 21% of it. Its 85.5% on time is 7 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 79.0%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 85.5% to Southwest at 75.6%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. American Airlines arrives on time 81.6% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 75.6%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,880 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on PHX to ABQ
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	685	85.5%	65 min	0.58%	A+
Envoy Airthin sample	187	82.3%	44 min	0.00%	B+
American Airlines	559	81.6%	91 min	0.89%	B+
Southwest Airlines	1,880	75.6%	49 min	0.21%	B+

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

Departure window

When SkyWest 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 685 flights.

5am–8am—
8am–11am164 flights87.2%
11am–2pm143 flights87.9%
2pm–5pm111 flights85.5%
5pm–8pm143 flights85.3%
8pm–5am124 flights80.6%

Scale runs 70% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The best window here is not the first bank but the 11am–2pm slot at 87.9% on time, ahead of 8pm–5am at 80.6%. 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 164 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on PHX to ABQ through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.December best, January worst

January is the weak month at 73.3% on time, against 94.3% in December. 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. March was the busiest month here, with 122 flights.

Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 91.5% on time and Sunday the weakest at 77.6%. 14 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 51% of the 6,445 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.

Carrier
51%
Late-arriving aircraft
38%
National Airspace System
10%
Extreme weather
1%

38% 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 6,445 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 29 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 6,445 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 51%, 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 3,275 of the 6,445 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.58%, 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 3.7% 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 328 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 11am–2pm window matters as much as it does.

The return leg runs 86.0% on time across 686 flights, within half 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. 685 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 PHX to ABQ

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 685 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 85.5% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 681 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