Carrier route record
OOSLC→DEN
SkyWest Airlines · Salt Lake City to Denver
- Flights
- 1,395
- 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 SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on SLC to DEN earns a B+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 7 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 1,395 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 1,690 at 79.4% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's SLC to DEN record is 7 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 70 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
84.6%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,386 completed flights
Avg delay
76 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.65%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
77.8%
Every carrier on SLC to DEN, 7,757 flights
These figures cover 1,395 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 9 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
SkyWest against every carrier on SLC to DEN
SkyWest flew 1,395 of the 7,757 flights on SLC to DEN, about 18% of it. Its 84.6% on time is 7 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 77.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 84.6% to Southwest at 72.4%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Delta Air Lines arrives on time 79.4% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 72.4%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 2,328 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines (this page) | 1,395 | 84.6% | 76 min | 0.65% | B+ |
| Delta Air Lines | 1,690 | 79.4% | 64 min | 0.24% | B+ |
| Frontier Airlines | 1,012 | 78.1% | 73 min | 0.89% | B+ |
| United Airlines | 1,332 | 78.0% | 61 min | 0.38% | B+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 2,328 | 72.4% | 51 min | 0.69% | C+ |
Delta leads Southwest by 7 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.
Flight by flight
SkyWest flight numbers on SLC to DEN
Departure window
When SkyWest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 24 points, against 7 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am267 flights93.6%
- 8am–11am437 flights81.2%
- 11am–2pm355 flights89.2%
- 2pm–5pm159 flights69.2%
- 5pm–8pm177 flights84.2%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 60% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 93.6% of the time, against 69.2% for the afternoon window. That is 24 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 437 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
SkyWest on SLC to DEN through the year
December is the weak month at 75.3% on time, against 89.9% in September. 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 150 flights.
Across the week, Sunday is the strongest day at 86.9% on time and Friday the weakest at 80.4%. 7 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why SkyWest runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 64% of the 16,000 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.
- 64%Carrier
- 16%Late-arriving aircraft
- 16%National Airspace System
- 4%Extreme weather
The largest share of delay minutes, 64%, 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 10,000 of the 16,000 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 16,153 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations are rare at 0.65%, 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
5.1% 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 a little over an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 391 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 79.4% on time across 1,399 flights, 5 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 5 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,395 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 SkyWest on SLC to DEN
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. September runs 89.9% on time and December 75.3%, a swing of 15 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 1,386 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- SLC to DEN, every carrier
- SkyWest on DEN to SLC, the return leg
- Delta Air Lines on SLC to DEN79.4%
- Frontier Airlines on SLC to DEN78.1%
- United Airlines on SLC to DEN78.0%
- Southwest Airlines on SLC to DEN72.4%
- SkyWest Airlines network-wide record
- Salt Lake City International (SLC) delay statistics
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- 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
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.