Route reliability record
SEA→PSP
Seattle to Palm Springs
- Flights
- 1,653
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 987 mi
- Carriers
- 3
This route lands a B+, 6 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 50 minutes on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 1,653 SEA to PSP flights, of which Alaska Airlines flew 1,057 at 84.2% on time.
Best time to fly SEA to PSP: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 92.1% of the time and Tuesday flights 87.3%, against 83.9% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 6 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 63 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
83.9%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,635 completed flights
Avg delay
49 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.85%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
Alaska
84.2% on time across 1,057 flights
These figures cover 1,653 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 7 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 SEA to PSP
The two carriers here are closely matched: half a point 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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alaska Airlines | 1,057 | 84.2% | 47 min | 0.66% | B+ |
| SkyWest Airlines | 417 | 83.5% | 53 min | 0.72% | B+ |
| Delta Air Linesthin sample | 179 | 82.9% | 53 min | 2.23% | B |
No carrier stands out. Alaska tops the table at 84.2%, half a point clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Best ways to make this trip
The most reliable ways to fly Seattle to Palm Springs
Every airline on this route, ranked by how often a scheduled flight actually operated and arrived on time, with its best departure time and most punctual flight number. No nearby airport pair beat these.
| Option | Airline | Success | On time | Cancelled | Best departure | Most punctual flight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. SEA → PSPSeattle to Palm Springs | Alaska Airlines | 83.6% | 84.2% | 0.66% | 5am–8am, Tue | — |
| 2. SEA → PSPSeattle to Palm Springs | SkyWest Airlines | 82.9% | 83.5% | 0.72% | 8pm–5am, Mon | — |
Success is the share of scheduled flights that operated and arrived less than 15 minutes late, so a cancelled flight counts against it. “(route)” means the best time comes from every carrier on the route rather than this airline alone.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 11 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–8am141 flights92.1%
- 8am–11am447 flights84.5%
- 11am–2pm315 flights81.2%
- 2pm–5pm205 flights82.7%
- 5pm–8pm280 flights82.4%
- 8pm–5am265 flights84.4%
Scale runs 75% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 81.2% on time against 92.1% for 5am–8am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 447 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 15 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
December is the weak month at 76.6% on time, against 91.7% in May. 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. April was the busiest month here, with 216 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 87.3% on time and Sunday the weakest at 80.3%. 7 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
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 13,000 reported delay minutes.
- 40%Carrier
- 35%Late-arriving aircraft
- 21%National Airspace System
- 4%Extreme weather
35% 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 13,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 8 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 12,978 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 40%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 5,194 of the 13,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.85%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Roughly one flight in 100 is called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.4% 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 987 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 is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 87.1% on time across 1,649 flights, 3 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 3 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,653 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in PSP after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. May runs 91.7% on time and December 76.6%, a swing of 15 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 1,635 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
SEA to PSP questions
How often is SEA to PSP delayed?
About one flight in six arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 16.1% of the 1,653 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by about 50 minutes on average.
Which airline is most reliable on SEA to PSP?
Alaska Airlines leads at 84.2% on time across 1,057 flights. SkyWest Airlines is at the other end on 83.5%, a gap of half a point. Sample size matters as much as the percentage: a rate built from a few hundred flights moves around far more than one built from ten thousand.
What time of day has the fewest delays on SEA to PSP?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 92.1% on time. The 11am–2pm window is the weakest at 81.2%, 11 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 SEA to PSP?
December is the weakest month at 76.6% on time, compared with 91.7% in May. Across the year that is 15 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
- PSP to SEA — the return legseparate record
- Seattle-Tacoma International (SEA) delay statistics
- Alaska Airlines on SEA to PSP84.2%
- SkyWest Airlines on SEA to PSP83.5%
- Delta Air Lines on SEA to PSP82.9%
- SEA to LAX, a related route83.4%
- SFO to PSP, a related route76.7%
- SEA to PHX, a related route79.2%
- Alaska Airlines on-time record84.2%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record83.5%
- Delta Air Lines on-time record82.9%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
Direction matters. SEA to PSP and PSP to SEA 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.