Carrier route record
WNSNA→PHX
Southwest Airlines · Santa Ana to Phoenix
- Flights
- 2,426
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 53%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on SNA to PHX lands a B+, 6 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by roughly 45 minutes on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 2,426 flights, with a median arrival 6 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, Southwest's SNA to PHX record is 6 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 56 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
83.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,408 completed flights
Avg delay
47 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.66%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
82.3%
Every carrier on SNA to PHX, 4,608 flights
These figures cover 2,426 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 6 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
Southwest against every carrier on SNA to PHX
Southwest flew 2,426 of the 4,608 flights on SNA to PHX, most of the route. Its 83.2% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 82.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 83.2% to American at 81.0%. 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlines (this page) | 2,426 | 83.2% | 47 min | 0.66% | B+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 288 | 83.2% | 92 min | 2.43% | B |
| American Airlines | 1,894 | 81.0% | 82 min | 0.58% | B+ |
Departure window
When Southwest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 20 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am323 flights93.5%
- 8am–11am471 flights89.4%
- 11am–2pm402 flights86.4%
- 2pm–5pm476 flights76.4%
- 5pm–8pm485 flights73.1%
- 8pm–5am269 flights85.2%
Scale runs 65% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 93.5% of the time, against 73.1% for the evening window. That is 20 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 485 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on SNA to PHX through the year
Delays peak in November, when the on-time rate falls to 71.2%. February is the strongest month at 91.4%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 20 points. December was the busiest month here, with 227 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 90.6% on time and Sunday the weakest at 75.1%. 16 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Southwest runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 52% of the 19,000 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.
- 52%Late-arriving aircraft
- 26%Carrier
- 21%National Airspace System
- 1%Extreme weather
- 1%Security
52% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. That is a cascade, and cascades start small and grow through the day. Across 19,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 52 to one. It is the strongest argument for booking the first departure of the morning, when the aircraft has been sitting at the gate overnight with nothing to inherit. The split is drawn from 18,852 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 93.5% on time here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.66%, 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 338 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 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 79.3% on time across 2,427 flights, 4 points below 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.
The sample behind these figures is 2,426 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 Southwest on SNA to PHX
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. February runs 91.4% on time and November 71.2%, a swing of 20 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of November before you think about anything else. 2,408 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- SNA to PHX, every carrier
- Southwest on PHX to SNA, the return leg
- Frontier Airlines on SNA to PHX83.2%
- American Airlines on SNA to PHX81.0%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- John Wayne Airport (SNA) delay statistics
- Phoenix Sky Harbor International (PHX) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.