Route reliability record
SFO→TUS
San Francisco to Tucson
- Flights
- 966
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 751 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route lands a B+, 2 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in five 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 966 SFO to TUS flights, with a median arrival 5 minutes early.
Best time to fly SFO to TUS: a 8am–11am departure, ideally on a Saturday. Flights in that window arrived on time 83.6% of the time and Saturday flights 84.6%, against 79.7% for the route overall.
The US average over the same twelve months is 77.6%, so there is little to separate this route from the country as a whole. The variation that matters here is internal: which carrier, and what time of day.
Key figures
On time
79.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 962 completed flights
Avg delay
59 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.31%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
80.1% on time across 903 flights
These figures cover 966 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 5 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 SFO to TUS
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 | 903 | 80.1% | 60 min | 0.33% | B+ |
| United Airlinesthin sample | 63 | 74.6% | 49 min | 0.00% | C+ |
Flight by flight
Flights on SFO to TUS
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.
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 15 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–8am—
- 8am–11am293 flights83.6%
- 11am–2pm109 flights68.8%
- 2pm–5pm173 flights81.4%
- 5pm–8pm267 flights81.1%
- 8pm–5am124 flights74.8%
Scale runs 60% to 90%. 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 68.8% on time against 83.6% for 8am–11am. 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 293 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 16 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.
June is the worst month at 70.0% on time, 16 points below March, the best at 86.1%. 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. November was the busiest month here, with 120 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 84.6% on time and Friday the weakest at 76.4%. 8 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 12,000 reported delay minutes.
- 38%National Airspace System
- 31%Late-arriving aircraft
- 29%Carrier
- 2%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
38% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 4,382 minutes out of 12,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 11,531 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 83.6% on time here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.31%, 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
6.7% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last about an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
The 751 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 71.7% on time across 966 flights, 8 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 8 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 966 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in TUS after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 966 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 79.7% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 962 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
SFO to TUS questions
How often is SFO to TUS delayed?
About one flight in five arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 20.3% of the 966 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by about an hour on average.
How reliable is SFO to TUS compared with the rest of the country?
79.7% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 2 points in its favour. That is worth a B+ on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on SFO to TUS?
The 8am–11am departure window is the strongest at 83.6% on time. The 11am–2pm window is the weakest at 68.8%, 15 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 June delays on SFO to TUS?
June is the weakest month at 70.0% on time, compared with 86.1% in March. Across the year that is 16 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
- TUS to SFO — the return legseparate record
- San Francisco International (SFO) delay statistics
- SFO to LAX, a related route73.9%
- PHX to TUS, a related route82.3%
- SFO to SEA, a related route73.7%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record80.1%
- United Airlines on-time record74.6%
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
Direction matters. SFO to TUS and TUS 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, July 2025 to June 2026. Last updated 15 September 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.