Carrier route record

OOPSP→DEN

SkyWest Airlines · Palm Springs to Denver

Flights: 576
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 28%
Carriers: 4

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

SkyWest on PSP to DEN 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 10 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs close to two hours. That rests on 576 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 871 at 80.1% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's PSP to DEN record is 10 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 98 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

87.4%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 573 completed flights

Avg delay

110 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.52%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

81.6%

Every carrier on PSP to DEN, 2,036 flights

These figures cover 576 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 14 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 PSP to DEN

SkyWest flew 576 of the 2,036 flights on PSP to DEN, about 28% of it. Its 87.4% on time is 6 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 81.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 87.4% to Southwest at 77.7%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The two carriers here are closely matched: 2 points separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.

On-time performance by carrier on PSP to DEN
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	576	87.4%	110 min	0.52%	A+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	46	82.6%	137 min	0.00%	B+
United Airlines	871	80.1%	76 min	1.15%	B
Southwest Airlines	543	77.7%	59 min	0.55%	B+

No carrier stands out. United tops the table at 80.1%, 2 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.

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 576 flights.

5am–8am111 flights89.2%
8am–11am298 flights86.5%
11am–2pm98 flights87.5%
2pm–5pm69 flights88.4%
5pm–8pm—
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 80% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The time of day barely matters here. The 5am–8am window tops the set at 89.2% and 8am–11am sits at 86.5%, 3 points apart across 576 flights. Pick the departure that suits the trip: whatever is going wrong here is not accumulating over the course of the day. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 298 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on PSP to DEN through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.May best, June worst

June is the worst month at 76.7% on time, 19 points below May, the best at 95.8%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. April was the busiest month here, with 84 flights.

Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 95.1% on time and Thursday the weakest at 82.1%. 13 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 56% of the 7,929 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
56%
National Airspace System
22%
Extreme weather
13%
Late-arriving aircraft
9%

Extreme weather accounts for 13% 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 2.1 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 7,929 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 56%, 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 4,472 of the 7,929 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.52%, 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

6.3% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last close to two hours, which a normal layover absorbs.

The 776 miles between these two airports put this in the middle of the US network, around two and a half to three hours of block time. That is enough cruise to absorb a ten-minute late pushback and not enough to absorb thirty. It is also long enough that the aircraft usually flies three or four legs a day rather than six, which slows how fast delay compounds.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 80.2% on time across 575 flights, 7 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 7 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 576 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 PSP to DEN

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 576 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 87.4% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 573 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