Carrier route record
OOSLC→SBA
SkyWest Airlines · Salt Lake City to Santa Barbara
- Flights
- 903
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 85%
- Carriers
- 2
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on SLC to SBA earns an A+. Nearly every flight arrives inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 17 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs roughly 50 minutes. That rests on 903 flights, with a median arrival 11 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's SLC to SBA record is 17 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 172 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
94.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 890 completed flights
Avg delay
48 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.78%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
93.4%
Every carrier on SLC to SBA, 1,060 flights
These figures cover 903 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
SkyWest against every carrier on SLC to SBA
SkyWest flew 903 of the 1,060 flights on SLC to SBA, most of the route. Its 94.8% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 93.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 94.8% to Delta at 84.9%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
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 (this page) | 903 | 94.8% | 48 min | 0.78% | A+ |
| Delta Air Linesthin sample | 157 | 84.9% | 60 min | 2.55% | B |
Flight by flight
SkyWest flight numbers on SLC to SBA
Departure window
When SkyWest 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 903 flights.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am334 flights94.3%
- 11am–2pm—
- 2pm–5pm204 flights93.1%
- 5pm–8pm2 flights—
- 8pm–5am363 flights96.3%
Scale runs 85% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The overnight block holds up unusually well at 96.3% on time across 363 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 363 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
SkyWest on SLC to SBA through the year
February is the weak month at 82.5% on time, against 98.9% in June. 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. May was the busiest month here, with 93 flights.
Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 96.9% on time and Saturday the weakest at 89.0%. 8 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 74% of the 2,187 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.
- 74%Carrier
- 17%Extreme weather
- 10%National Airspace System
Extreme weather accounts for 17% 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 2.7 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 2,187 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 74%, 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 1,610 of the 2,187 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.78%, 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
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 1.2% 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.
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. 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 runs 96.0% on time across 903 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. 903 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 SkyWest on SLC to SBA
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 903 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 94.8% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 890 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
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.