Carrier route record

NKSAT→LAX

Spirit Airlines · San Antonio to Los Angeles

Flights: 101
Period: September 2025 to August 2026
Share of route: 6%
Carriers: 4

Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.

Spirit on SAT to LAX lands a B−, 5 points better than the national rate of 77.3%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by a little over an hour on average. That rests on 101 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, SkyWest Airlines, flew 697 at 90.3% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Spirit's SAT to LAX record is 5 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 52 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

82.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 97 completed flights

Avg delay

77 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

3.96%

National rate is 1.89%

Whole route

85.9%

Every carrier on SAT to LAX, 1,814 flights

These figures cover 101 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 8.2% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.

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Carrier by carrier

Spirit against every carrier on SAT to LAX

Spirit flew 101 of the 1,814 flights on SAT to LAX, about 6% of it. Its 82.5% on time is 3 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 85.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 90.3% to Southwest at 72.1%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The two carriers here are closely matched: 2 points 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.

On-time performance by carrier on SAT to LAX
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlines	697	90.3%	122 min	0.29%	A+
Delta Air Lines	679	88.8%	107 min	0.29%	A+
Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample	101	82.5%	77 min	3.96%	B−
Southwest Airlinesthin sample	337	72.1%	49 min	0.00%	C+

No carrier stands out. SkyWest tops the table at 90.3%, 2 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.

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Departure window

When Spirit 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 101 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Spirit's SAT to LAX record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 82.5% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Spirit on SAT to LAX through the year

Jul–Sep 202522 flights—
Oct–Dec 202573 flights82.6%
Jan–Mar 20266 flights—

Scale runs 75% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 82.5% on time across 101 flights.

Split by quarter, Spirit on SAT to LAX logged 22 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 73 flights in Oct–Dec 2025 and 6 flights in Jan–Mar 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 82.5% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why Spirit 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 1,311 reported delay minutes.

Carrier
41%
Late-arriving aircraft
40%
National Airspace System
20%

40% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 1,311 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 40 to one. The split is drawn from 1,311 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 41%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 537 of the 1,311 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations run at 3.96%, against 1.89% nationally. That is about one flight in 25 cancelled outright. A cancelled flight is invisible in every on-time figure on this page, so the punctuality numbers above describe only the flights that actually operated.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

8.2% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.3%, so a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last a little over an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.

The 1,211 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.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 79.4% on time across 101 flights, 3 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 3 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 101 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.

What to do with this

Booking Spirit on SAT to LAX

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.96% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 5am–8am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 97 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated 22 October 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.

Key figures