Carrier route record
WNSFO→BUR
Southwest Airlines · San Francisco to Burbank
- Flights
- 337
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 11%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on SFO to BUR earns an F−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 51.8% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 26 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 337 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 1,524 at 80.9% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Southwest on SFO to BUR runs 26 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 258 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
51.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 326 completed flights
Avg delay
63 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.26%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
77.0%
Every carrier on SFO to BUR, 3,036 flights
These figures cover 337 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 18.7% 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
Southwest against every carrier on SFO to BUR
Southwest flew 337 of the 3,036 flights on SFO to BUR, about 11% of it. Its 51.8% on time is 25 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 77.0%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 80.9% to Southwest at 51.8%.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 2 points 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlines | 1,524 | 80.9% | 55 min | 0.13% | B+ |
| SkyWest Airlines | 1,175 | 78.9% | 71 min | 1.62% | B |
| Southwest Airlines (this page)thin sample | 337 | 51.8% | 63 min | 3.26% | F− |
No carrier stands out. United tops the table at 80.9%, 2 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Departure window
When Southwest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 20 points, against 2 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am22 flights—
- 8am–11am88 flights45.7%
- 11am–2pm45 flights37.8%
- 2pm–5pm72 flights47.1%
- 5pm–8pm105 flights57.7%
- 8pm–5am5 flights—
Scale runs 30% to 65%. 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 37.8% on time against 57.7% for 5pm–8pm. 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 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 105 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on SFO to BUR through the year
- Jan–Mar 202677 flights73.7%
- Apr–Jun 2026260 flights45.2%
Scale runs 35% to 80%. 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 51.8% on time across 337 flights.
Split by quarter, Southwest on SFO to BUR logged 77 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 260 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 51.8% annual figure is the one to use.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 68.6% on time and Friday the weakest at 36.7%. 32 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Southwest runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 82% of the 9,917 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.
- 82%Late-arriving aircraft
- 13%Carrier
- 5%National Airspace System
- 0%Extreme weather
82% 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 9,917 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 82 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 9,917 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations run at 3.26%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in 30 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
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 18.7% 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 326 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 39.8% on time across 337 flights, 12 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 12 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 337 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 Southwest on SFO to BUR
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.26% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you about 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. 326 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- SFO to BUR, every carrier
- Southwest on BUR to SFO, the return leg
- United Airlines on SFO to BUR80.9%
- SkyWest Airlines on SFO to BUR78.9%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
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.