Route reliability record
TUS→SLC
Tucson to Salt Lake City
- Flights
- 1,112
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 600 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route earns an A+. Nearly every flight arrives inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 16 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 1,112 TUS to SLC flights, with a median arrival 17 minutes early.
Best time to fly TUS to SLC: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 97.7% of the time and Tuesday flights 95.6%, against 93.7% for the route overall.
Set against the rest of the country, this route's record is 16 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 161 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
93.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,107 completed flights
Avg delay
79 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.27%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
93.8% on time across 1,087 flights
These figures cover 1,112 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 17 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
Which airline is most reliable on TUS to SLC
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 | 1,087 | 93.8% | 81 min | 0.18% | A+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 25 | 87.5% | 36 min | 4.00% | A− |
Flight by flight
Flights on TUS to SLC
The flight numbers below flew this route at least 250 times in the period, busiest first. Each has its own record, with its schedule and delay causes.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
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–8am303 flights97.7%
- 8am–11am74 flights95.8%
- 11am–2pm365 flights95.3%
- 2pm–5pm77 flights84.2%
- 5pm–8pm293 flights89.4%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 75% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 97.7% of the time, against 84.2% 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 365 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
Twelve months, one bar each, drawn from the same 1,112 flights. The strip shows how much of this route's record is set by the calendar rather than by the operation.
Delays peak in November, when the on-time rate falls to 88.4%. July is the strongest month at 97.8%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 9 points. March was the busiest month here, with 103 flights.
The day of the week is close to irrelevant here: 3 points separates the best day from the worst. Weekly demand peaks are not what drives the delays on this operation.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 74% of the 5,543 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.
- 74%Carrier
- 22%Extreme weather
- 3%National Airspace System
- 1%Late-arriving aircraft
Extreme weather accounts for 22% 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 3.5 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 5,543 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 74%, 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 4,103 of the 5,543 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.27%, 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 actually costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 2.7% 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.
The 600 miles between these two airports put this in the middle of the US network, around two and a half to three hours of block time. That is enough cruise to absorb a ten-minute late pushback and not enough to absorb thirty. It is also long enough that the aircraft usually flies three or four legs a day rather than six, which slows how fast delay compounds.
The return leg runs 91.6% on time across 1,112 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 1,112 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in SLC after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: take the 5am–8am departure, avoid November if the dates are flexible, and if two carriers are within a few dollars of each other, SkyWest is the one with the record behind it. None of that guarantees an on-time arrival; it moves the odds by 14 points, which is the most any booking decision can do. 1,107 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
TUS to SLC questions
How often is TUS to SLC delayed?
About one flight in fifteen arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 6.3% of the 1,112 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
How reliable is TUS to SLC compared with the rest of the country?
93.7% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 16 points in its favour. That is worth a A+ on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on TUS to SLC?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 97.7% on time. The 2pm–5pm window is the weakest at 84.2%, 14 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are November delays on TUS to SLC?
November is the weakest month at 88.4% on time, compared with 97.8% in July. Across the year that is 9 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- SLC to TUS — the return legseparate record
- Salt Lake City International (SLC) delay statistics
- TUS to PHX, a related route83.8%
- DEN to SLC, a related route77.5%
- TUS to DEN, a related route82.9%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record93.8%
- Frontier Airlines on-time record87.5%
- 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
Direction matters. TUS to SLC and SLC to TUS are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.