Carrier route record
ASPHX→SAN
Alaska Airlines · Phoenix to San Diego
- Flights
- 218
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 4%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Alaska Airlines.
Alaska on PHX to SAN 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 218 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Frontier Airlines, flew 406 at 76.5% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Alaska's PHX to SAN record is 8 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 78 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
85.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 213 completed flights
Avg delay
56 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.29%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
73.1%
Every carrier on PHX to SAN, 5,933 flights
These figures cover 218 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 4 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 PHX to SAN
Alaska flew 218 of the 5,933 flights on PHX to SAN, about 4% of it. Its 85.4% on time is 12 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 73.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Alaska at 85.4% to SkyWest at 69.3%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Frontier Airlines arrives on time 76.5% of the time; SkyWest Airlines manages 69.3%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 446 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alaska Airlines (this page)thin sample | 218 | 85.4% | 56 min | 2.29% | A |
| Frontier Airlines | 406 | 76.5% | 83 min | 0.99% | B+ |
| American Airlines | 1,670 | 74.5% | 64 min | 0.72% | C+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 3,193 | 71.7% | 50 min | 1.03% | C |
| SkyWest Airlines | 446 | 69.3% | 53 min | 4.93% | C− |
SkyWest Airlines cancels 4.9% of what it schedules here, the highest in the table. A cancelled flight never appears in an on-time rate, so read that column alongside the punctuality one rather than after it.
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 11 points, against 7 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am73 flights90.1%
- 8am–11am6 flights—
- 11am–2pm66 flights89.2%
- 2pm–5pm73 flights78.9%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 70% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 90.1% of the time, against 78.9% for the afternoon window. That is 11 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 73 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Alaska on PHX to SAN through the year
- Jul–Sep 2025125 flights85.4%
- Oct–Dec 202593 flights85.6%
Scale runs 75% to 90%. 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 85.4% on time across 218 flights.
Split by quarter, Alaska on PHX to SAN logged 125 flights in Jul–Sep 2025 and 93 flights in Oct–Dec 2025. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 85.4% annual figure is the one to use.
Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 90.6% on time and Friday the weakest at 80.0%. 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. National Airspace System accounts for 43% of the 1,743 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.
- 43%National Airspace System
- 30%Carrier
- 27%Late-arriving aircraft
43% 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 758 minutes out of 1,743, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 1,743 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations sit at 2.29% 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 4.7% 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 304 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 77.9% on time across 217 flights, 8 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 8 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 218 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 PHX to SAN
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 218 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 85.4% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 213 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- PHX to SAN, every carrier
- Alaska on SAN to PHX, the return leg
- Frontier Airlines on PHX to SAN76.5%
- American Airlines on PHX to SAN74.5%
- Southwest Airlines on PHX to SAN71.7%
- SkyWest Airlines on PHX to SAN69.3%
- Alaska Airlines network-wide record
- Phoenix Sky Harbor International (PHX) delay statistics
- San Diego International (SAN) delay statistics
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- Late aircraft, weather, or the airline: what actually causes US flight delays
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.