Carrier route record
OOSBA→SFO
SkyWest Airlines · Santa Barbara to San Francisco
- Flights
- 579
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 36%
- Carriers
- 2
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on SBA to SFO earns an F, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 53.2% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 24 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average about an hour. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 579 flights, with a median arrival 12 minutes late.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so SkyWest on SBA to SFO runs 24 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 244 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
53.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 564 completed flights
Avg delay
68 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.25%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
62.9%
Every carrier on SBA to SFO, 1,611 flights
These figures cover 579 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 16.3% 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
SkyWest against every carrier on SBA to SFO
SkyWest flew 579 of the 1,611 flights on SBA to SFO, about 36% of it. Its 53.2% on time is 10 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 62.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 68.3% to SkyWest at 53.2%.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlines | 1,032 | 68.3% | 71 min | 1.07% | C |
| SkyWest Airlines (this page) | 579 | 53.2% | 68 min | 2.25% | F |
Departure window
When SkyWest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 60 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–8am50 flights72.3%
- 8am–11am353 flights45.5%
- 11am–2pm—
- 2pm–5pm84 flights73.2%
- 5pm–8pm48 flights83.0%
- 8pm–5am44 flights23.3%
Scale runs 15% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 23.3% on time, against 83.0% for the 5pm–8pm 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 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 353 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
SkyWest on SBA to SFO through the year
July is the worst month at 13.3% on time, 65 points below January, the best at 77.8%. 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 90 flights.
Across the week, Sunday is the strongest day at 60.7% on time and Friday the weakest at 43.9%. 17 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. National Airspace System accounts for 47% of the 18,000 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.
- 47%National Airspace System
- 33%Carrier
- 15%Late-arriving aircraft
- 5%Extreme weather
47% 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 8,377 minutes out of 18,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 17,850 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations sit at 2.25% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.35%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 16.3% 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 262 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 5pm–8pm window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 76.2% on time across 578 flights, 23 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 23 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 579 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 SkyWest on SBA to SFO
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 579 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 53.2% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 564 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- SBA to SFO, every carrier
- SkyWest on SFO to SBA, the return leg
- United Airlines on SBA to SFO68.3%
- SkyWest Airlines network-wide record
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
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.