Carrier route record
DLSBA→SLC
Delta Air Lines · Santa Barbara to Salt Lake City
- Flights
- 128
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 12%
- Carriers
- 2
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Delta Air Lines.
Delta on SBA to SLC 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 12 points better than the national rate of 77.3%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 128 flights, with a median arrival 11 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, Delta's SBA to SLC record is 12 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 121 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
89.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 123 completed flights
Avg delay
74 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.91%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
94.2%
Every carrier on SBA to SLC, 1,062 flights
These figures cover 128 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. The median arrival is 11 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.
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Carrier by carrier
Delta against every carrier on SBA to SLC
Delta flew 128 of the 1,062 flights on SBA to SLC, about 12% of it. Its 89.4% on time is 5 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 94.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 94.8% to Delta at 89.4%.
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 | 934 | 94.8% | 96 min | 0.54% | A+ |
| Delta Air Lines (this page)thin sample | 128 | 89.4% | 74 min | 3.91% | A− |
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Departure window
When Delta 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 128 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Delta's SBA to SLC record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 89.4% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
Delta on SBA to SLC through the year
- Jul–Sep 202525 flights—
- Oct–Dec 202584 flights90.1%
- Jan–Mar 202619 flights—
Scale runs 80% to 95%. 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 89.4% on time across 128 flights.
Split by quarter, Delta on SBA to SLC logged 25 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 84 flights in Oct–Dec 2025 and 19 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 89.4% annual figure is the one to use.
Arrival by arrival
How late Delta on SBA to SLC runs when it is late
Delta on SBA to SLC often beats the schedule: 47 of 123 completed flights, 38%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. When Delta on SBA to SLC is late it tends to be very late: 9 of its 13 late arrivals were an hour or more behind, and 2 were two hours or more.
- 15+ min early47 flights38.2%
- Within 15 min63 flights51.2%
- 15–29 min late2 flights1.6%
- 30–59 min late2 flights1.6%
- 1–2 hours late7 flights5.7%
- 2+ hours late2 flights1.6%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 123 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
Only 15 of 123 completed flights left 15 minutes late or more, too few to say how often the time is made up.
The worst days
Worst days for Delta on SBA to SLC
The latest arrival of the period was on 21 December 2025, 2 hours 10 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. Three of the five worst days fell in December 2025.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 21 December 2025 | 2 hours 10 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 5 October 2025 | 2 hours 8 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 20 December 2025 | 1 hour 55 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 24 December 2025 | 1 hour 26 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 8 September 2025 | 1 hour 25 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
Delay causes
Why Delta runs late on this route
Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 94% of the 962 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 94%Late-arriving aircraft
- 4%Carrier
- 2%National Airspace System
94% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 962 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 94 to one. The split is drawn from 962 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations run at 3.91%, 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
7.3% 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 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.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 85.4% on time across 128 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 128 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 Delta on SBA to SLC
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.91% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 5pm–8pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 123 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.