Route reliability record
RDM→SFO
Redmond to San Francisco
- Flights
- 1,278
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 462 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route draws a C+. About 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 1,278 RDM to SFO flights, of which United Airlines flew 620 at 66.9% on time.
Best time to fly RDM to SFO: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 88.7% of the time and Tuesday flights 73.5%, against 66.7% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so this route runs 11 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 109 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
66.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,259 completed flights
Avg delay
70 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.94%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
United
66.9% on time across 620 flights
These figures cover 1,278 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 12.5% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.
Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on RDM to SFO
The two carriers here are closely matched: half a point 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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlines | 620 | 66.9% | 65 min | 0.48% | C+ |
| SkyWest Airlines | 658 | 66.5% | 74 min | 1.37% | C |
No carrier stands out. United tops the table at 66.9%, half a point clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Flight by flight
Flights on RDM 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.
Best ways to make this trip
The most reliable ways to fly Redmond to San Francisco
Every airline on this route, ranked by how often a scheduled flight actually operated and arrived on time, with its best departure time and most punctual flight number. No nearby airport pair beat these.
| Option | Airline | Success | On time | Cancelled | Best departure | Most punctual flight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. RDM → SFORedmond to San Francisco | United Airlines | 66.6% | 66.9% | 0.48% | 5am–8am, Thu | UA 2262 13:55 |
| 2. RDM → SFORedmond to San Francisco | SkyWest Airlines | 65.6% | 66.5% | 1.37% | 5am–8am, Tue | OO 5534 19:50 |
Success is the share of scheduled flights that operated and arrived less than 15 minutes late, so a cancelled flight counts against it. “(route)” means the best time comes from every carrier on the route rather than this airline alone.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 65 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am400 flights88.7%
- 8am–11am41 flights53.8%
- 11am–2pm46 flights23.9%
- 2pm–5pm368 flights59.6%
- 5pm–8pm314 flights52.9%
- 8pm–5am109 flights73.4%
Scale runs 15% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 23.9% on time against 88.7% for 5am–8am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 400 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 30 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.
June is the worst month at 50.0% on time, 30 points below March, the best at 80.0%. 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. June was the busiest month here, with 125 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 73.5% on time and Monday the weakest at 59.8%. 14 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. National Airspace System accounts for 50% of the 29,000 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.
- 50%National Airspace System
- 24%Carrier
- 21%Late-arriving aircraft
- 5%Extreme weather
50% 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 15,000 minutes out of 29,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 29,258 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations sit at 0.94% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.55%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 12.5% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
At 462 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 77.7% on time across 1,278 flights, 11 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 11 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,278 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. March runs 80.0% on time and June 50.0%, a swing of 30 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of June before you think about anything else. 1,259 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
RDM to SFO questions
How often is RDM to SFO delayed?
About 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 33.3% of the 1,278 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
Which airline is most reliable on RDM to SFO?
United Airlines leads at 66.9% on time across 620 flights. SkyWest Airlines is at the other end on 66.5%, a gap of half a point. Sample size matters as much as the percentage: a rate built from a few hundred flights moves around far more than one built from ten thousand.
What time of day has the fewest delays on RDM to SFO?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 88.7% on time. The 11am–2pm window is the weakest at 23.9%, 65 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 June delays on RDM to SFO?
June is the weakest month at 50.0% on time, compared with 80.0% in March. Across the year that is 30 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 RDM — the return legseparate record
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- United Airlines on RDM to SFO66.9%
- SkyWest Airlines on RDM to SFO66.5%
- RDM to SEA, a related route85.4%
- LAX to SFO, a related route64.8%
- RDM to PHX, a related route91.6%
- United Airlines on-time record66.9%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record66.5%
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
Direction matters. RDM to SFO and SFO to RDM 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.