Route reliability record
SFO→ACV
San Francisco to Arcata/Eureka
- Flights
- 1,293
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Distance
- 250 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route sits in the middle of the pack with a C. Close to three flights in four arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 4 points worse than the national rate of 77.3%. The late ones land an hour and a half behind schedule. That rests on 1,293 SFO to ACV flights, with a median arrival 5 minutes early.
Best time to fly SFO to ACV: a 11am–2pm departure, ideally on a Saturday. Flights in that window arrived on time 74.9% of the time and Saturday flights 80.6%, against 73.3% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so this route runs 4 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 40 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
73.3%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,232 completed flights
Avg delay
92 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.47%
National rate is 1.89%
Best carrier
SkyWest
73.5% on time across 1,272 flights
These figures cover 1,293 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 11.4% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on SFO to ACV
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 | 1,272 | 73.5% | 93 min | 2.52% | C |
| United Airlinesthin sample | 21 | 61.9% | 62 min | 0.00% | D+ |
Flight by flight
Flights on SFO to ACV
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.
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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 1,293 flights.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am344 flights72.3%
- 11am–2pm193 flights74.9%
- 2pm–5pm323 flights73.5%
- 5pm–8pm35 flights70.6%
- 8pm–5am398 flights73.5%
Scale runs 60% to 80%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The overnight block holds up unusually well at 73.5% on time across 398 flights. Red-eyes fly into empty airspace and empty gates, and they are the first rotation of the aircraft's day rather than the last. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 398 flights scheduled in it.
Explore
Filter SFO to ACV by airline, time, month and day
Pick a breakdown and a carrier. The dashed mark on each row is the same slice for every US flight.
On SFO to ACV, the best departure window is 11am–2pm at 74.9% on time and the worst is 5pm–8pm at 70.6%, a narrow gap of 4.3 points. All US flights leaving 11am–2pm ran 78.3%.
- 5–8am—
- 8–11am72.3%
- 11am–2pm74.9%
- 2–5pm73.5%
- 5–8pm70.6%
- 8pm–5am73.5%
best all US flightsScale 60% to 95%. Cells under 30 flights show a dash.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 35 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.
July is the worst month at 55.7% on time, 35 points below March, the best at 90.6%. 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. July was the busiest month here, with 123 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 80.6% on time and Sunday the weakest at 68.4%, a spread of 12 points.
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 30,000 reported delay minutes.
- 29%National Airspace System
- 24%Extreme weather
- 24%Carrier
- 23%Late-arriving aircraft
Extreme weather accounts for 24% 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 4.0 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 30,303 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations sit at 2.47% against a national 1.89%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 2.24%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
11.4% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
At 250 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 11am–2pm window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 56.5% on time across 1,291 flights, 17 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 17 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,293 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 ACV 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. March runs 90.6% on time and July 55.7%, a swing of 35 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of July before you think about anything else. 1,232 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
SFO to ACV questions
How often is SFO to ACV delayed?
About one flight in four arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 26.7% of the 1,293 flights in this analysis, against 22.7% nationally. Delayed flights are late by an hour and a half on average.
How reliable is SFO to ACV compared with the rest of the country?
73.3% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.3%, a difference of 4 points against it. That is worth a C on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on SFO to ACV?
The 11am–2pm departure window is the strongest at 74.9% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 70.6%, 4 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 July delays on SFO to ACV?
July is the weakest month at 55.7% on time, compared with 90.6% in March. Across the year that is 35 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
- ACV to SFO — the return legseparate record
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- SFO to LAX, a related route70.9%
- SFO to SEA, a related route72.3%
- SFO to JFK, a related route78.0%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record73.5%
- United Airlines on-time record61.9%
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
Direction matters. SFO to ACV and ACV to SFO 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, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.