Carrier route record

OOSMF→LAS

SkyWest Airlines · Sacramento to Las Vegas

Flights: 405
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 10%
Carriers: 4

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.

SkyWest on SMF to LAS earns an A. Close to nine flights in ten arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 13 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs an hour and a half. That rests on 405 flights, with a median arrival 13 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's SMF to LAS record is 13 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 131 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

90.7%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 399 completed flights

Avg delay

90 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.48%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

80.1%

Every carrier on SMF to LAS, 4,238 flights

These figures cover 405 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 13 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 SMF to LAS

SkyWest flew 405 of the 4,238 flights on SMF to LAS, about 10% of it. Its 90.7% on time is 11 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 80.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 90.7% to Frontier at 76.4%. Two 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.

On-time performance by carrier on SMF to LAS
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	405	90.7%	90 min	1.48%	A
Spirit Airlinesthin sample	190	86.0%	69 min	2.11%	A
Southwest Airlines	3,432	78.7%	54 min	0.35%	B+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	211	76.4%	77 min	1.42%	B

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 405 flights.

5am–8am44 flights90.9%
8am–11am131 flights94.6%
11am–2pm42 flights85.7%
2pm–5pm188 flights89.1%
5pm–8pm—
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 75% to 100%. 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 85.7% on time against 94.6% 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 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 188 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on SMF to LAS through the year

Jul–Sep 2025224 flights88.4%
Oct–Dec 2025164 flights94.3%
Jan–Mar 202617 flights—

Scale runs 80% to 100%. 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 90.7% on time across 405 flights.

Split by quarter, SkyWest on SMF to LAS logged 224 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 164 flights in Oct–Dec 2025 and 17 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 90.7% annual figure is the one to use.

Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 96.6% on time and Friday the weakest at 82.1%. 15 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 54% of the 3,322 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.

Carrier
54%
National Airspace System
27%
Extreme weather
18%

Extreme weather accounts for 18% 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 3.0 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 3,322 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 54%, 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 1,809 of the 3,322 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations sit at 1.48% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.5% 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 397 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 8am–11am window matters as much as it does.

The return leg runs 88.2% on time across 406 flights, within 3 points 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. 405 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 SMF to LAS

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 405 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 90.7% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 399 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

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.

Key figures