Carrier route record
DLSLC→SBA
Delta Air Lines · Salt Lake City to Santa Barbara
- Flights
- 128
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 12%
- Carriers
- 2
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Delta Air Lines.
Delta on SLC to SBA earns an A−. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 8 points better than the national rate of 77.3%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 128 flights, with a median arrival 10 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, Delta's SLC to SBA record is 8 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 81 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
85.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 123 completed flights
Avg delay
68 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.12%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
92.0%
Every carrier on SLC to SBA, 1,062 flights
These figures cover 128 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 8.1% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
Delta against every carrier on SLC to SBA
Delta flew 128 of the 1,062 flights on SLC to SBA, about 12% of it. Its 85.4% on time is 7 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 92.0%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 92.9% to Delta at 85.4%.
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 | 934 | 92.9% | 53 min | 0.43% | A+ |
| Delta Air Lines (this page)thin sample | 128 | 85.4% | 68 min | 3.12% | A− |
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Departure window
When Delta runs best on this route
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 128 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Delta's SLC to SBA record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 85.4% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
Delta on SLC to SBA through the year
- Jul–Sep 202525 flights—
- Oct–Dec 202584 flights85.2%
- Jan–Mar 202619 flights—
Scale runs 75% to 90%. 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 85.4% on time across 128 flights.
Split by quarter, Delta on SLC to SBA logged 25 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 84 flights in Oct–Dec 2025 and 19 flights in Jan–Mar 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 85.4% annual figure is the one to use.
Arrival by arrival
How late Delta on SLC to SBA runs when it is late
Delta on SLC to SBA often beats the schedule: 47 of 123 completed flights, 38%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. When Delta on SLC to SBA is late it tends to be very late: 10 of its 18 late arrivals were an hour or more behind, and 2 were two hours or more.
- 15+ min early47 flights38.2%
- Within 15 min58 flights47.2%
- 15–29 min late4 flights3.3%
- 30–59 min late4 flights3.3%
- 1–2 hours late8 flights6.5%
- 2+ hours late2 flights1.6%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 123 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
5 of 23 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 22% of them. No flight that left on time arrived late.
The worst days
Worst days for Delta on SLC to SBA
The latest arrival of the period was on 21 December 2025, 2 hours 31 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. Three of the five worst days fell in December 2025.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 21 December 2025 | 2 hours 31 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 5 October 2025 | 2 hours 19 minutes | Carrier |
| 24 December 2025 | 1 hour 55 minutes | Carrier |
| 8 September 2025 | 1 hour 52 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 20 December 2025 | 1 hour 33 minutes | Carrier |
Delay causes
Why Delta runs late on this route
Carrier accounts for 55% of the 1,228 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 55%Carrier
- 42%Late-arriving aircraft
- 2%National Airspace System
42% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 1,228 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 42 to one. The split is drawn from 1,228 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 55%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 679 of the 1,228 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations run at 3.12%, against 1.89% 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
8.1% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.3%, so 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.
The 615 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.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 89.4% on time across 128 flights, 4 points above 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 4 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 128 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 Delta on SLC to SBA
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.12% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 2pm–5pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 123 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.