Route reliability record
SBA→SLC
Santa Barbara to Salt Lake City
- Flights
- 1,060
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 615 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route earns an A. Nearly every flight arrives inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 18 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs an hour and a half. That rests on 1,060 SBA to SLC flights, with a median arrival 15 minutes early.
Best time to fly SBA to SLC: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Thursday. Flights in that window arrived on time 97.8% of the time and Thursday flights 98.0%, against 95.2% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 18 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 176 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
95.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,046 completed flights
Avg delay
96 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.32%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
96.0% on time across 903 flights
These figures cover 1,060 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 15 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
Which airline is most reliable on SBA to SLC
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 | 903 | 96.0% | 105 min | 1.00% | A |
| Delta Air Linesthin sample | 157 | 90.8% | 74 min | 3.18% | A− |
Flight by flight
Flights on SBA to SLC
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.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
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 1,060 flights.
- 5am–8am365 flights97.8%
- 8am–11am—
- 11am–2pm365 flights93.0%
- 2pm–5pm116 flights97.4%
- 5pm–8pm214 flights93.4%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 85% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The early departures do better, though not dramatically: 97.8% on time for the 5am–8am window against 93.0% for 11am–2pm. Worth taking if the schedule allows, not worth an extra connection. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 365 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
Twelve months, one bar each, drawn from the same 1,060 flights. The strip shows how much of this route's record is set by the calendar rather than by the operation.
December is the weak month at 90.7% on time, against 98.8% in November. 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. May was the busiest month here, with 93 flights.
Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 98.0% on time and Saturday the weakest at 92.4%. 6 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. Extreme weather accounts for 48% of the 4,792 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.
- 48%Extreme weather
- 30%Carrier
- 20%Late-arriving aircraft
- 2%National Airspace System
Extreme weather accounts for 48% 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 7.7 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 4,792 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations sit at 1.32% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 2.4% 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.
The 615 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. It is also long enough that the aircraft usually flies three or four legs a day rather than six, which slows how fast delay compounds.
The return leg runs 93.4% on time across 1,060 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.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 1,060 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in SLC after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 1,060 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 95.2% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 1,046 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
SBA to SLC questions
How often is SBA to SLC delayed?
About one flight in twenty arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 4.8% of the 1,060 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by an hour and a half on average.
How reliable is SBA to SLC compared with the rest of the country?
95.2% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 18 points in its favour. That is worth a A on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on SBA to SLC?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 97.8% on time. The 11am–2pm window is the weakest at 93.0%, 5 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 December delays on SBA to SLC?
December is the weakest month at 90.7% on time, compared with 98.8% in November. Across the year that is 8 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
- SLC to SBA — the return legseparate record
- Salt Lake City International (SLC) delay statistics
- SkyWest Airlines on SBA to SLC96.0%
- Delta Air Lines on SBA to SLC90.8%
- SBA to SFO, a related route62.9%
- DEN to SLC, a related route77.5%
- SBA to PHX, a related route84.4%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record96.0%
- Delta Air Lines on-time record90.8%
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
- Late aircraft, weather, or the airline: what actually causes US flight delays
Direction matters. SBA to SLC and SLC to SBA 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.