Carrier route record

OOSMF→LAX

SkyWest Airlines · Sacramento to Los Angeles

Flights: 3,517
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 62%
Carriers: 5

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

SkyWest on SMF to LAX 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 3,517 flights, with a median arrival 11 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's SMF to LAX record is 13 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 125 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

90.1%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 3,501 completed flights

Avg delay

86 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.45%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

86.0%

Every carrier on SMF to LAX, 5,637 flights

These figures cover 3,517 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 SMF to LAX

SkyWest flew 3,517 of the 5,637 flights on SMF to LAX, most of the route. Its 90.1% on time is 4 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 86.0%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 95.9% to Frontier at 73.9%. Three 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 LAX
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Delta Air Linesthin sample	99	95.9%	24 min	1.01%	A
United Airlinesthin sample	201	91.5%	72 min	0.00%	A+
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	3,517	90.1%	86 min	0.45%	A+
Southwest Airlines	1,616	77.3%	48 min	0.19%	B+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	204	73.9%	60 min	2.45%	C

Flight by flight

SkyWest flight numbers on SMF to LAX

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 3,517 flights.

5am–8am887 flights90.5%
8am–11am580 flights91.3%
11am–2pm533 flights89.2%
2pm–5pm536 flights88.2%
5pm–8pm698 flights89.5%
8pm–5am283 flights92.6%

Scale runs 80% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The overnight block holds up unusually well at 92.6% on time across 283 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 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 887 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on SMF to LAX through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.June best, January worst

January is the weak month at 84.5% on time, against 93.2% 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. October was the busiest month here, with 358 flights.

Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 93.6% on time and Sunday the weakest at 87.5%. 6 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 52% of the 30,000 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.

Carrier
52%
Late-arriving aircraft
23%
Extreme weather
20%
National Airspace System
6%

Extreme weather accounts for 20% 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 3.2 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 29,836 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 52%, 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 15,000 of the 30,000 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.45%, 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 3.6% 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 373 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 87.8% on time across 3,517 flights, within 2 points of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.

The sample behind these figures is 3,517 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 SMF to LAX

Put together: SkyWest's SMF to LAX record is 90.1% on time with 0.45% cancelled, worth an A+. The largest single lever is the 8pm–5am departure window, and the numbers below the table are where the reasoning behind that lives. 3,501 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