Route reliability record
SLC→GTF
Salt Lake City to Great Falls
- Flights
- 1,071
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 463 mi
- Carriers
- 1
This route earns an A+. Nearly every flight arrives inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 16 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs roughly 50 minutes. That rests on 1,071 SLC to GTF flights, with a median arrival 11 minutes early.
Best time to fly SLC to GTF: a 8pm–5am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 95.8% of the time and Tuesday flights 96.2%, against 93.2% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 16 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 156 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
93.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,061 completed flights
Avg delay
52 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.75%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
93.2% on time across 1,071 flights
These figures cover 1,071 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 11 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 SLC to GTF
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 | 1,071 | 93.2% | 52 min | 0.75% | A+ |
Flight by flight
Flights on SLC to GTF
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 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 1,071 flights.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am340 flights95.5%
- 11am–2pm24 flights—
- 2pm–5pm343 flights88.0%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am364 flights95.8%
Scale runs 80% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The overnight block holds up unusually well at 95.8% on time across 364 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 364 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 13 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.
October is the best month on the calendar at 98.9% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. May was the busiest month here, with 93 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 96.2% on time and Monday the weakest at 89.0%. 7 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 69% of the 3,731 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.
- 69%Carrier
- 24%Extreme weather
- 8%National Airspace System
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 3.8 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 3,731 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 69%, 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 2,557 of the 3,731 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.75%, 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
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 1.6% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. Connections built on this flight are about as safe as US domestic connections get, though a cancelled flight still ignores every layover you give it.
At 463 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 8pm–5am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg runs 92.3% on time across 1,071 flights, within about a point of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 1,071 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 GTF after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 1,071 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 93.2% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 1,061 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
SLC to GTF questions
How often is SLC to GTF delayed?
About one flight in fifteen arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 6.8% of the 1,071 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by roughly 50 minutes on average.
How reliable is SLC to GTF compared with the rest of the country?
93.2% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 16 points in its favour. That is worth a A+ on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on SLC to GTF?
The 8pm–5am departure window is the strongest at 95.8% on time. The 2pm–5pm window is the weakest at 88.0%, 8 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 March delays on SLC to GTF?
March is the weakest month at 86.4% on time, compared with 98.9% in October. Across the year that is 13 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
- GTF to SLC — the return legseparate record
- Salt Lake City International (SLC) delay statistics
- SLC to DEN, a related route77.8%
- DEN to GTF, a related route77.7%
- SLC to PHX, a related route83.9%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record93.2%
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
- How to read this site: grades, sample sizes, and honest caveats
Direction matters. SLC to GTF and GTF to SLC 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.