Carrier route record

OOSMF→LAX

SkyWest Airlines · Sacramento to Los Angeles

Flights: 3,558
Period: September 2025 to August 2026
Share of route: 62%
Carriers: 5

Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 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 77.3%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs an hour and a half. That rests on 3,558 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 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 126 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

89.9%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 3,544 completed flights

Avg delay

87 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.39%

National rate is 1.89%

Whole route

85.6%

Every carrier on SMF to LAX, 5,717 flights

These figures cover 3,558 flights between September 2025 and August 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.

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Carrier by carrier

SkyWest against every carrier on SMF to LAX

SkyWest flew 3,558 of the 5,717 flights on SMF to LAX, most of the route. Its 89.9% on time is 4 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 85.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 92.7% to Frontier at 72.5%. 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	55	92.7%	31 min	0.00%	A+
United Airlinesthin sample	202	91.6%	72 min	0.00%	A+
SkyWest Airlines (this page)	3,558	89.9%	87 min	0.39%	A+
Southwest Airlines	1,660	77.1%	48 min	0.30%	B+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	242	72.5%	62 min	2.48%	C

Flight by flight

SkyWest flight numbers on SMF to LAX

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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 3,558 flights.

5am–8am908 flights90.9%
8am–11am620 flights90.4%
11am–2pm498 flights90.7%
2pm–5pm539 flights88.7%
5pm–8pm702 flights88.2%
8pm–5am291 flights91.1%

Scale runs 80% to 95%.

The overnight block holds up unusually well at 91.1% on time across 291 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 908 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 93.1% on time and Saturday the weakest at 86.8%, a spread of 6 points.

Arrival by arrival

How late SkyWest on SMF to LAX runs when it is late

SkyWest on SMF to LAX often beats the schedule: 1,359 of 3,544 completed flights, 38%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 357 late arrivals split 133 under half an hour, 86 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 138 an hour or more.

15+ min early1,359 flights38.3%
Within 15 min1,828 flights51.6%
15–29 min late133 flights3.8%
30–59 min late86 flights2.4%
1–2 hours late76 flights2.1%
2+ hours late62 flights1.7%

Scale runs 0% to 100%.

Share of 3,544 completed flights by arrival against schedule.

64 of 326 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 20% of them. 95 flights left on time and still arrived late.

The worst days

Worst days for SkyWest on SMF to LAX

The latest arrival of the period was on 25 May 2026, 24 hours 52 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. The five worst days are spread across May, January, August and July, with no single month standing out.

The latest arrivals of SkyWest on SMF to LAX in the period
Date	Arrived late by	Largest filed cause
25 May 2026	24 hours 52 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
19 January 2026	21 hours 12 minutes	Extreme weather
2 August 2026	18 hours 38 minutes	Carrier
8 July 2026	11 hours 5 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
29 May 2026	8 hours 48 minutes	Extreme weather

Delay causes

Why SkyWest runs late on this route

Carrier accounts for 47% of the 31,000 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.

Carrier
47%
Late-arriving aircraft
28%
Extreme weather
19%
National Airspace System
6%
Security
0%

Extreme weather accounts for 19% 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 31,038 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 47%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 15,000 of the 31,000 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.39%, below the national 1.89% 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 3.9% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% 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 87.7% on time across 3,559 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 3,558 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 89.9% on time with 0.39% 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. 3,544 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated 22 October 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.

Key figures