Carrier route record

OORNO→LAX

SkyWest Airlines · Reno to Los Angeles

Flights: 2,037
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 82%
Carriers: 3

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

SkyWest on RNO to LAX 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 2,037 flights, with a median arrival 12 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's RNO to LAX record is 11 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 112 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

88.8%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,031 completed flights

Avg delay

69 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.29%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

87.3%

Every carrier on RNO to LAX, 2,494 flights

These figures cover 2,037 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 12 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 RNO to LAX

SkyWest flew 2,037 of the 2,494 flights on RNO to LAX, most of the route. Its 88.8% on time is 2 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 87.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 88.8% to Southwest at 78.6%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

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.

On-time performance by carrier on RNO to LAX
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	2,037	88.8%	69 min	0.29%	A+
United Airlinesthin sample	114	86.0%	41 min	0.00%	A+
Southwest Airlinesthin sample	343	78.6%	57 min	1.75%	B

Flight by flight

SkyWest flight numbers on RNO to LAX

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 2,037 flights.

5am–8am592 flights90.2%
8am–11am403 flights92.3%
11am–2pm300 flights90.9%
2pm–5pm150 flights85.9%
5pm–8pm502 flights83.8%
8pm–5am90 flights90.0%

Scale runs 75% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 92.3% of the time, against 83.8% for the evening window. That is 9 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 592 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on RNO to LAX through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.September best, February worst

February is the weak month at 80.6% on time, against 94.9% 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. August was the busiest month here, with 212 flights.

Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 92.9% on time and Friday the weakest at 85.2%. 8 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 55% of the 16,000 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.

Carrier
55%
Extreme weather
19%
Late-arriving aircraft
16%
National Airspace System
10%
Security
0%

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 3.1 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 15,612 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 55%, 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 8,548 of the 16,000 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.29%, 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

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.2% 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 390 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 8am–11am window matters as much as it does.

The return leg runs 90.8% on time across 2,037 flights, within 2 points of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.

The sample behind these figures is 2,037 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.

What to do with this

Booking SkyWest on RNO to LAX

Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. September runs 94.9% on time and February 80.6%, a swing of 14 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of February before you think about anything else. 2,031 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