SkyWest Airlines

Against the 15 carriers FlyerIntel covers — all measured over the same period, from the same source — SkyWest Airlines ranks 5th of 15 for on-time arrivals, 7th for cancellations and 9th for arrivals more than an hour late. The full table is at the foot of this page.

Over the last 12 months SkyWest Airlines arrived on time 79.0% of the time, against 80.2% in the 12 months before — broadly unchanged.

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics · Data covering July 2023 – June 2026

SkyWest Airlines cancelled 31,266 of 2,356,571 scheduled flights — about 1 in every 75. The reason it filed most often was extreme weather, 83.9% of the cancellations it coded — about 1 in every 90 scheduled flights.

Weather also sits inside the air traffic figure — code B covers only conditions severe enough to stop a flight outright, while ordinary bad weather is counted as an air traffic system cause — so weather’s full contribution is larger than the weather bar alone.

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics · Data covering July 2023 – June 2026 · These are the reason codes SkyWest Airlines itself filed with US DOT — the reason the airline gave, not an independent finding of fault, and airlines differ in how they apply them. FlyerIntel publishes the split only for carriers with at least 500 coded cancellations in the period; 31,266 were recorded.

Each column is one month of SkyWest Airlines operations. The strongest single month of the period was November 2023 at 86.7% on time; the weakest was December 2025 at 72.9%. Individual months move for reasons that do not repeat — a hurricane season, a technology outage, a winter storm — which is why the section below combines the same data by calendar month instead.

Source: FlyerIntel analysis of US DOT BTS data · July 2023 – June 2026

Combining 3 years of operations by calendar month, SkyWest Airlines is at its best in October, when 84.6% of arrivals were on time, and at its worst in June at 76.7% — a spread of 8.0 percentage points between two months of the same airline. Cancellations peak in a month of their own: January at 3.15% of flights, against 0.28% in October.

This is the shape of the calendar, not a forecast. It says that if you book SkyWest Airlines in June you are booking into the part of the year when this airline has historically been least punctual, and that an October itinerary starts from a better position. It does not say anything about a particular date, and it cannot: the figure behind each month is 3 years of that same month combined, precisely so that one storm does not decide the answer.

Source: FlyerIntel analysis of US DOT BTS data · July 2023 – June 2026 · Rates are recalculated from the summed monthly counts, so a heavy month carries more weight than a light one.

The largest single category for SkyWest Airlines is the airline itself, at 48.9% of attributed minutes. That is the one category squarely inside the carrier’s own control — crew, maintenance, boarding, fuelling — and across the 15 carriers covered here it accounts for 34.0% of attributed minutes. That is 14.9 percentage points more of its delay minutes falling inside the airline than is typical for this group.

These shares describe how delay minutes were divided, not how often delays happened. A carrier with an unusually large air-traffic-control share is not necessarily worse run; it may simply fly more of its schedule through congested airspace. The one category that is squarely the airline’s own is the carrier category, which is why it is the one compared above.

Source: US DOT BTS delay cause categories · July 2023 – June 2026 · Cause minutes are only reported for arrivals delayed 15 minutes or more.

SkyWest Airlines departed from 290 airports in this period, with no single one accounting for more than 8.3% of departures and the largest three together 21.2%. Performance is spread across the network rather than resting on one or two hubs, so a single weak airport moves this carrier’s overall figure less than it would at a hub-and-spoke airline.

Source: FlyerIntel analysis of US DOT BTS data · July 2023 – June 2026 · Airports where this carrier flew fewer than 500 departures are not listed.

Source: FlyerIntel analysis of US DOT BTS data · July 2023 – June 2026 · Routes with fewer than 600 flights by this carrier are not ranked.

78 SkyWest Airlines flight numbers have operated their current route at least 600 times. The strongest of them, OO3745 from Tucson to Salt Lake City, arrived on time 97.6% of the time. The weakest, OO5648 from Milwaukee to Chicago, managed 58.2% — a gap of 39 percentage points inside one airline. The departures in the first column are scheduled to leave at a median of 7:05 AM; those in the second at 5:45 PM.

Choosing between two flights on the same airline and the same day is a decision most travellers make on price and timing alone, because nothing at the point of booking distinguishes them. These figures do. They are the record of the exact flight number, on the route it flies today, over the whole analysis period — not a carrier average applied to it.

Source: FlyerIntel analysis of US DOT BTS data · July 2023 – June 2026 · A flight number is a slot in a schedule and gets reassigned to different city pairs over time, so each is measured only on the route it currently operates. Numbers with fewer than 600 operations on that route, or last flown more than a quarter ago, are not ranked. Schedules change — confirm a departure still operates before booking around it.

Every carrier on FlyerIntel is measured the same way, over the same period, using the same source data. That is the whole point of the table: airline marketing reports punctuality on definitions of its own choosing, and this does not.

Source: FlyerIntel analysis of US DOT BTS data · July 2023 – June 2026 · Score is the FlyerIntel Airline Reliability Score. See all airlines ranked →