Route reliability record
PSP→PDX
Palm Springs to Portland
- Flights
- 737
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 873 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route 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 an hour and a half. That rests on 737 PSP to PDX flights, with a median arrival 16 minutes early.
Best time to fly PSP to PDX: a 8am–11am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 97.1% of the time and Tuesday flights 98.0%, against 94.5% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 17 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 169 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
94.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 724 completed flights
Avg delay
94 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.76%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
Alaska
93.8% on time across 508 flights
These figures cover 737 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 16 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 PSP to PDX
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 Airlinesthin sample | 229 | 96.0% | 101 min | 1.75% | A |
| Alaska Airlines | 508 | 93.8% | 92 min | 1.77% | A |
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 737 flights.
- 5am–8am362 flights95.5%
- 8am–11am38 flights97.1%
- 11am–2pm119 flights93.2%
- 2pm–5pm81 flights93.8%
- 5pm–8pm130 flights92.1%
- 8pm–5am7 flights—
Scale runs 85% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The early departures do better, though not dramatically: 97.1% on time for the 8am–11am window against 92.1% for 5pm–8pm. Worth taking if the schedule allows, not worth an extra connection. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 362 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 12 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
January is the weak month at 87.7% on time, against 100.0% in September. 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 117 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 98.0% on time and Saturday the weakest at 89.8%. 8 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 3,769 reported delay minutes.
- 33%National Airspace System
- 29%Carrier
- 26%Late-arriving aircraft
- 12%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 12% 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 1.9 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 3,769 reported delay minutes.
33% 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 1,242 minutes out of 3,769, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations sit at 1.76% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 2.5% 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.
The 873 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 83.8% on time across 738 flights, 11 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 11 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 737 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in PDX after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 737 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 94.5% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 724 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
PSP to PDX questions
How often is PSP to PDX delayed?
Roughly one flight in twenty arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 5.5% of the 737 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by an hour and a half on average.
How reliable is PSP to PDX compared with the rest of the country?
94.5% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 17 points in its favour. That is worth a A on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on PSP to PDX?
The 8am–11am departure window is the strongest at 97.1% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 92.1%, 5 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 January delays on PSP to PDX?
January is the weakest month at 87.7% on time, compared with 100.0% in September. Across the year that is 12 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- PDX to PSP — the return legseparate record
- Portland International (PDX) delay statistics
- SkyWest Airlines on PSP to PDX96.0%
- Alaska Airlines on PSP to PDX93.8%
- PSP to SFO, a related route64.5%
- SEA to PDX, a related route83.1%
- PSP to DEN, a related route81.6%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record96.0%
- Alaska Airlines on-time record93.8%
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
- How to read this site: grades, sample sizes, and honest caveats
Direction matters. PSP to PDX and PDX to PSP are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
Embed PSP to PDX’s on-time badge on your site
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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.