Carrier route record
OOTUS→LAX
SkyWest Airlines · Tucson to Los Angeles
- Flights
- 2,115
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 82%
- Carriers
- 2
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on TUS to LAX earns an A+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 9 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 2,115 flights, with a median arrival 11 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's TUS to LAX record is 9 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 89 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
86.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,106 completed flights
Avg delay
85 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.43%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
85.9%
Every carrier on TUS to LAX, 2,581 flights
These figures cover 2,115 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 TUS to LAX
SkyWest flew 2,115 of the 2,581 flights on TUS to LAX, most of the route. Its 86.5% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 85.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 86.5% to Southwest at 83.2%.
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) | 2,115 | 86.5% | 85 min | 0.43% | A+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 466 | 83.2% | 45 min | 0.43% | B+ |
Flight by flight
SkyWest flight numbers on TUS to LAX
Departure window
When SkyWest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 14 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–8am527 flights93.7%
- 8am–11am340 flights86.8%
- 11am–2pm604 flights86.3%
- 2pm–5pm138 flights79.7%
- 5pm–8pm506 flights80.7%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 70% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 93.7% of the time, against 79.7% for the afternoon window. That is 14 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 604 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
SkyWest on TUS to LAX through the year
February is the weak month at 77.0% on time, against 91.7% 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 186 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 89.3% on time and Sunday the weakest at 81.0%. 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 62% of the 24,000 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.
- 62%Carrier
- 20%Late-arriving aircraft
- 11%Extreme weather
- 4%Security
- 3%National Airspace System
The largest share of delay minutes, 62%, 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 24,000 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 24,264 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations are rare at 0.43%, 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
6.1% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last an hour and a half, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 451 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 83.1% on time across 2,114 flights, 3 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 3 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 2,115 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 TUS to LAX
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. June runs 91.7% on time and February 77.0%, a swing of 15 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of February before you think about anything else. 2,106 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- TUS to LAX, every carrier
- SkyWest on LAX to TUS, the return leg
- Southwest Airlines on TUS to LAX83.2%
- SkyWest Airlines network-wide record
- Los Angeles International (LAX) delay statistics
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
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.