Carrier route record
OOSAN→SJC
SkyWest Airlines · San Diego to San Jose
- Flights
- 1,140
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 23%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on SAN to SJC lands a B, 5 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about 55 minutes on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 1,140 flights, with a median arrival 8 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's SAN to SJC record is 5 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 53 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
82.9%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,127 completed flights
Avg delay
54 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.14%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
77.6%
Every carrier on SAN to SJC, 4,953 flights
These figures cover 1,140 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 8 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 SAN to SJC
SkyWest flew 1,140 of the 4,953 flights on SAN to SJC, about 23% of it. Its 82.9% on time is 5 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 77.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 82.9% to Spirit at 75.0%. 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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines (this page) | 1,140 | 82.9% | 54 min | 1.14% | B |
| Alaska Airlinesthin sample | 48 | 81.2% | 33 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 3,741 | 76.0% | 49 min | 0.80% | B+ |
| Spirit Airlinesthin sample | 24 | 75.0% | 115 min | 0.00% | B+ |
Flight by flight
SkyWest flight numbers on SAN to SJC
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 1,140 flights.
- 5am–8am21 flights—
- 8am–11am322 flights88.7%
- 11am–2pm205 flights80.1%
- 2pm–5pm73 flights80.8%
- 5pm–8pm257 flights80.5%
- 8pm–5am262 flights79.4%
Scale runs 70% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 88.7% of the time, against 79.4% for the overnight 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 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 322 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
SkyWest on SAN to SJC through the year
December is the weak month at 75.0% on time, against 92.7% in February. 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. November was the busiest month here, with 147 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 93.9% on time and Friday the weakest at 72.2%. 22 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why SkyWest runs late on this route
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 10,000 reported delay minutes.
- 40%Late-arriving aircraft
- 29%Carrier
- 21%National Airspace System
- 9%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
40% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. That is a cascade, and cascades start small and grow through the day. Across 10,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 4 to one. It is the strongest argument for booking the first departure of the morning, when the aircraft has been sitting at the gate overnight with nothing to inherit. The split is drawn from 10,479 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 88.7% on time here.
Cancellations sit at 1.14% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
5.5% 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 about 55 minutes, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 417 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 is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 77.1% on time across 1,166 flights, 6 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 6 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,140 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 SAN to SJC
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. February runs 92.7% on time and December 75.0%, a swing of 18 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 1,127 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- SAN to SJC, every carrier
- SkyWest on SJC to SAN, the return leg
- Southwest Airlines on SAN to SJC76.0%
- SkyWest Airlines network-wide record
- San Diego International (SAN) delay statistics
- Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International (SJC) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.