Carrier route record
ASSFO→LAS
Alaska Airlines · San Francisco to Las Vegas
- Flights
- 1,116
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 18%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Alaska Airlines.
Alaska on SFO to LAS lands a B+, about a point worse than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in four arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 1,116 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 2,757 at 79.6% on time.
United Airlines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 79.6% on time across 2,757 flights.
Key figures
On time
76.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,107 completed flights
Avg delay
66 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.81%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
74.1%
Every carrier on SFO to LAS, 6,066 flights
These figures cover 1,116 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.9% 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
Alaska against every carrier on SFO to LAS
Alaska flew 1,116 of the 6,066 flights on SFO to LAS, about 18% of it. Its 76.5% on time is 2 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 74.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 79.6% to SkyWest at 50.0%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. United Airlines arrives on time 79.6% of the time; Frontier Airlines manages 65.6%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 879 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlines | 2,757 | 79.6% | 55 min | 0.36% | B+ |
| Alaska Airlines (this page) | 1,116 | 76.5% | 66 min | 0.81% | B+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 1,312 | 66.3% | 64 min | 0.53% | C+ |
| Frontier Airlines | 879 | 65.6% | 96 min | 1.25% | C |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 2 | 50.0% | 81 min | 0.00% | F+ |
The spread between United and Frontier is 14 points, wide enough that it should decide the booking. On a hundred trips that is 14 more arrivals inside the on-time window.
Flight by flight
Alaska flight numbers on SFO to LAS
Departure window
When Alaska runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 28 points, against 14 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am88 flights93.1%
- 8am–11am243 flights89.4%
- 11am–2pm143 flights65.0%
- 2pm–5pm221 flights76.5%
- 5pm–8pm279 flights69.5%
- 8pm–5am142 flights70.2%
Scale runs 55% 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 65.0% on time against 93.1% 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 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 279 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Alaska on SFO to LAS through the year
Delays peak in April, when the on-time rate falls to 54.8%. February is the strongest month at 90.1%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 35 points. January was the busiest month here, with 110 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 83.9% on time and Monday the weakest at 73.0%. 11 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Alaska runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 49% of the 17,000 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.
- 49%Late-arriving aircraft
- 27%Carrier
- 20%National Airspace System
- 4%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
49% 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 17,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 12 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 17,156 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 93.1% on time here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.81%, 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 costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 9.9% 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 414 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 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 66.5% on time across 1,116 flights, 10 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 10 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,116 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.
What to do with this
Booking Alaska on SFO to LAS
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. February runs 90.1% on time and April 54.8%, a swing of 35 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of April before you think about anything else. 1,107 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- SFO to LAS, every carrier
- Alaska on LAS to SFO, the return leg
- United Airlines on SFO to LAS79.6%
- Southwest Airlines on SFO to LAS66.3%
- Frontier Airlines on SFO to LAS65.6%
- Alaska Airlines network-wide record
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- Harry Reid International (LAS) delay statistics
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
- 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.