Carrier route record

DLPHX→LAX

Delta Air Lines · Phoenix to Los Angeles

Flights: 142
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 2%
Carriers: 7

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

Delta on PHX to LAX earns an A+. Nearly every flight arrives inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 17 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about 3.1 hours. That rests on 142 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, SkyWest Airlines, flew 2,590 at 90.2% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Delta's PHX to LAX record is 17 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 174 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

95.0%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 141 completed flights

Avg delay

185 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.70%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

82.8%

Every carrier on PHX to LAX, 7,598 flights

These figures cover 142 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 15 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

Delta against every carrier on PHX to LAX

Delta flew 142 of the 7,598 flights on PHX to LAX, about 2% of it. Its 95.0% on time is 12 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 82.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of seven carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 100.0% to Southwest at 72.6%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. SkyWest Airlines arrives on time 90.2% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 72.6%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 2,007 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on PHX to LAX
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Envoy Airthin sample	5	100.0%	—	0.00%	A+
Delta Air Lines (this page)thin sample	142	95.0%	185 min	0.70%	A+
SkyWest Airlines	2,590	90.2%	67 min	0.73%	A+
United Airlinesthin sample	339	87.8%	104 min	0.59%	A+
Frontier Airlines	489	83.1%	86 min	1.02%	B
American Airlines	2,026	81.7%	63 min	0.54%	B+
Southwest Airlines	2,007	72.6%	49 min	0.55%	C+

The spread between SkyWest and Southwest is 18 points, wide enough that it should decide the booking. On a hundred trips that is 18 more arrivals inside the on-time window.

Departure window

When Delta 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 142 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Delta's PHX to LAX record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 95.0% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Delta on PHX to LAX through the year

Oct–Dec 202576 flights97.4%
Jan–Mar 202662 flights93.4%
Apr–Jun 20264 flights—

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 95.0% on time across 142 flights.

Split by quarter, Delta on PHX to LAX logged 76 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 62 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 4 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 95.0% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why Delta runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 73% of the 1,297 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
73%
Late-arriving aircraft
26%
National Airspace System
1%

The largest share of delay minutes, 73%, 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 945 of the 1,297 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 1,297 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations are rare at 0.70%, 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 2.8% 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 370 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 83.0% on time across 142 flights, 12 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 12 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 142 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 Delta on PHX to LAX

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 142 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 95.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 141 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