Route reliability record
PSP→SFO
Palm Springs to San Francisco
- Flights
- 2,598
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Distance
- 421 mi
- Carriers
- 4
This route draws a D+. Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 2,598 PSP to SFO flights, with a median arrival 5 minutes late.
Best time to fly PSP to SFO: a 11am–2pm departure, ideally on a Saturday. Flights in that window arrived on time 64.7% of the time and Saturday flights 67.3%, against 61.1% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so this route runs 16 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 162 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
61.1%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,530 completed flights
Avg delay
71 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.85%
National rate is 1.89%
Best carrier
SkyWest
61.7% on time across 2,256 flights
These figures cover 2,598 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 14.5% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on PSP to SFO
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 | 2,256 | 61.7% | 68 min | 0.93% | D+ |
| United Airlinesthin sample | 307 | 58.8% | 96 min | 0.33% | D+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 22 | 54.5% | 73 min | 0.00% | F+ |
| Alaska Airlinesthin sample | 13 | 23.1% | 72 min | 0.00% | F+ |
Flight by flight
Flights on PSP to SFO
The flight numbers below flew this route at least 250 times in the period, busiest first. Each has its own record, with its schedule and delay causes.
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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 2,598 flights.
- 5am–8am463 flights61.7%
- 8am–11am400 flights62.3%
- 11am–2pm535 flights64.7%
- 2pm–5pm637 flights62.0%
- 5pm–8pm563 flights55.4%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 45% to 70%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 55.4% on time, against 64.7% for the 11am–2pm slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 637 flights scheduled in it.
Explore
Filter PSP to SFO by airline, time, month and day
Pick a breakdown and a carrier. The dashed mark on each row is the same slice for every US flight.
On PSP to SFO, the best departure window is 11am–2pm at 64.7% on time and the worst is 5pm–8pm at 55.4%, a real gap of 9.3 points. All US flights leaving 11am–2pm ran 78.3%.
- 5–8am61.7%
- 8–11am62.3%
- 11am–2pm64.7%
- 2–5pm62.0%
- 5–8pm55.4%
- 8pm–5am—
best all US flightsScale 45% to 95%. Cells under 30 flights show a dash.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 51 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.
Delays peak in May, when the on-time rate falls to 33.0%. January is the strongest month at 84.4%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 51 points. April was the busiest month here, with 250 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 67.3% on time and Monday the weakest at 57.1%, a spread of 10 points.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
National Airspace System accounts for 53% of the 70,000 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 53%National Airspace System
- 27%Carrier
- 18%Late-arriving aircraft
- 1%Extreme weather
53% 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 38,000 minutes out of 70,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 70,303 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations are rare at 0.85%, below the national 1.89% 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
14.5% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
At 421 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 11am–2pm window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 73.9% on time across 2,577 flights, 13 points above 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 13 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 2,598 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 SFO after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. January runs 84.4% on time and May 33.0%, a swing of 51 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of May before you think about anything else. 2,530 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
PSP to SFO questions
How often is PSP to SFO delayed?
Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 38.9% of the 2,598 flights in this analysis, against 22.7% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
How reliable is PSP to SFO compared with the rest of the country?
61.1% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.3%, a difference of 16 points against it. That is worth a D+ on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on PSP to SFO?
The 11am–2pm departure window is the strongest at 64.7% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 55.4%, 9 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 May delays on PSP to SFO?
May is the weakest month at 33.0% on time, compared with 84.4% in January. Across the year that is 51 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
- SFO to PSP — the return legseparate record
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- SkyWest Airlines on PSP to SFO61.7%
- United Airlines on PSP to SFO58.8%
- PSP to DEN, a related route82.5%
- LAX to SFO, a related route60.1%
- PSP to SEA, a related route87.4%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record61.7%
- United Airlines on-time record58.8%
- Frontier Airlines on-time record54.5%
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.05 million flight records
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
Direction matters. PSP to SFO and SFO to PSP 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, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.