Route reliability record
PSC→SEA
Pasco to Seattle
- Flights
- 1,819
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 172 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route earns an A+. Close to nine flights in ten arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 11 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 1,819 PSC to SEA flights, with a median arrival 10 minutes early.
Best time to fly PSC to SEA: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Monday. Flights in that window arrived on time 92.2% of the time and Monday flights 91.4%, against 88.3% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 11 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 107 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
88.3%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,804 completed flights
Avg delay
79 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.82%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
89.2% on time across 1,543 flights
These figures cover 1,819 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 10 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
Which airline is most reliable on PSC to SEA
Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines | 1,543 | 89.2% | 80 min | 0.71% | A+ |
| Alaska Airlinesthin sample | 276 | 83.1% | 75 min | 1.45% | B |
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
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 1,819 flights.
- 5am–8am503 flights92.2%
- 8am–11am205 flights87.7%
- 11am–2pm578 flights85.9%
- 2pm–5pm120 flights85.8%
- 5pm–8pm387 flights88.6%
- 8pm–5am26 flights—
Scale runs 75% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The early departures do better, though not dramatically: 92.2% on time for the 5am–8am window against 85.8% for 2pm–5pm. Worth taking if the schedule allows, not worth an extra connection. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 578 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
Twelve months, one bar each, drawn from the same 1,819 flights. The strip shows how much of this route's record is set by the calendar rather than by the operation.
Delays peak in April, when the on-time rate falls to 86.2%. March is the strongest month at 92.4%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 6 points. October was the busiest month here, with 213 flights.
Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 91.4% on time and Friday the weakest at 83.7%. 8 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 51% of the 17,000 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.
- 51%Carrier
- 22%Late-arriving aircraft
- 19%Extreme weather
- 8%National Airspace System
Extreme weather accounts for 19% of delay minutes, well above the single-digit share typical across the system. Weather delays are lumpy: they arrive as whole bad days rather than as a steady drag, so the monthly strip above is the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 3.0 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 16,701 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 8,509 of the 17,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.82%, 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 actually 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 172 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 83.9% on time across 1,818 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.
The sample behind these figures is 1,819 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in SEA after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: take the 5am–8am departure, avoid April if the dates are flexible, and if two carriers are within a few dollars of each other, SkyWest is the one with the record behind it. None of that guarantees an on-time arrival; it moves the odds by 6 points, which is the most any booking decision can do. 1,804 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
PSC to SEA questions
How often is PSC to SEA delayed?
About one flight in nine arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 11.7% of the 1,819 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
How reliable is PSC to SEA compared with the rest of the country?
88.3% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 11 points in its favour. That is worth a A+ on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on PSC to SEA?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 92.2% on time. The 2pm–5pm window is the weakest at 85.8%, 6 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are April delays on PSC to SEA?
April is the weakest month at 86.2% on time, compared with 92.4% in March. Across the year that is 6 points between the best and worst months. The seasonal swing is modest enough that it should not decide when you travel.
Related
Where to go next
- SEA to PSC — the return legseparate record
- Seattle-Tacoma International (SEA) delay statistics
- SkyWest Airlines on PSC to SEA89.2%
- Alaska Airlines on PSC to SEA83.1%
- PSC to SLC, a related route93.7%
- LAX to SEA, a related route85.4%
- PSC to DEN, a related route89.4%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record89.2%
- Alaska Airlines on-time record83.1%
- Late aircraft, weather, or the airline: what actually causes US flight delays
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
Direction matters. PSC to SEA and SEA to PSC are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.