Which Los Angeles airport should you fly from?

• On-time arrivalONT had the best on-time arrival rate, 83.5%, ahead of BUR at 82.8%, SNA at 82.2%, LAX at 81.4%. Best to worst is 2.1 points.
• CancellationsBUR cancelled 1.25% of its flights, 1.6 times the rate at LAX (0.78%).
• Taxi timeTaxi-out averages 18.1 min at LAX and 13.6 min at ONT, 4.6 minutes more between pushback and wheels-up. Coming in, taxi time runs from 4.4 min at BUR to 10.7 min at LAX.
• Time of dayThe best airport depends on when you leave: clearly ahead ONT at 5–9 AM, BUR at 9 AM–12 PM, and SNA at 9 PM–5 AM. The gap is widest for departures at 9 PM–5 AM (SNA 90.6% against BUR 65.1%) and narrowest at 6–9 PM (1.9 points).
• Hour by hourThe biggest swing through the day is at BUR: 7 AM–8 AM reached 92.8% on time (12,673 flights) and 9 PM–10 PM fell to 64.9% (1,277), 27.9 points apart.
• AirlinesSouthwest Airlines flies 61% of departures from BUR, more than any other carrier at any airport here. The largest carrier at each: Southwest Airlines at BUR (61%), Southwest Airlines at ONT (44%), Southwest Airlines at SNA (33%), and SkyWest Airlines at LAX (20%). Carriers with 500 or more departures at only one of them: Envoy Air at BUR.
• Destinations76 destinations outside the metro area get 750 or more flights from these airports; 29 of them from at least two and 14 from every airport. LAX alone serves 46 destinations (28% of its departures), including Boston (BOS), Miami (MIA), and Orlando (MCO).
• Same destinationsOn the 14 destinations every airport serves, on-time arrival runs from 80.2% at LAX to 83.7% at ONT: 3.5 points, wider than the 2.1 points over all their flights; ONT leads clearly.

ONT is clearly ahead of the rest on 3 of 4 rates, LAX on 1.

A check mark and green mark the best figure in a row (higher for on-time rates, lower for delays and cancellations) when it is clearly better than every other airport’s: a two-proportion test on each airport’s flight count, at about 95% confidence. Otherwise the row says “too close to call” and a “≈” marks the airports that cannot be told apart from the best figure. Average and median delay carry no sample-error estimate here, so they are marked by the printed figure alone.

Share of the metro is each airport’s part of the 906,104 departures at these 4 airports. Taxi-out is pushback to wheels-up on departure and taxi-in is touchdown to gate on arrival, averaged over all flights. The score is the FlyerIntel Reliability Score, 0 to 100.

Source: FlyerIntel analysis of US DOT BTS data · July 2023 – July 2026 · Departing flights only.

A window needs at least 120 flights at an airport to be scored. The check mark uses the same test as the table above. Gap is best minus worst among the scored airports.

Source: FlyerIntel analysis of US DOT BTS data · July 2023 – July 2026 · Windows are the scheduled local departure time at each airport.

Each chart has its own scale, so read the numbers in the table, not the bar heights, when comparing airports. The best and worst of 24 hours are the two extremes, so a small airport’s best hour is partly luck; the flight count is beside each. A swing under 3 points, or one the two hours’ flight counts cannot separate from chance, is marked as within noise.

Source: FlyerIntel analysis of US DOT BTS data · July 2023 – July 2026 · Hours are the scheduled local departure hour. An hour needs at least 120 flights to be scored.

Airlines are the operating carrier, so a regional airline flying for a larger one is listed under its own name. Only airlines with at least 500 departures at an airport are listed there.

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

Destinations every airport serves

14 places get 750 or more flights from each of LAX, SNA, BUR, and ONT. Counting only flights to those places (43% of LAX’s, 82% of SNA’s, 88% of BUR’s, and 90% of ONT’s departures):

The shared places: Atlanta (ATL), Austin (AUS), Dallas (DAL), Denver (DEN), Dallas–Fort Worth (DFW), Las Vegas (LAS), Oakland (OAK), Portland (PDX), Phoenix (PHX), Seattle (SEA), San Francisco (SFO), San Jose (SJC), Salt Lake City (SLC), Sacramento (SMF).

The same airline at different airports

Where one airline flies from several of these airports, its own on-time rate at each. The airline is the same, so a gap is not about who flies, though the routes each flies from an airport still differ.

Source: FlyerIntel analysis of US DOT BTS data · July 2023 – July 2026 · Same test as above. A dash means the airline has fewer than 500 departures at that airport.

• Different airlines. SkyWest Airlines flies 20% of LAX’s departures; Southwest Airlines flies 33% of SNA’s departures; Southwest Airlines flies 61% of BUR’s departures; Southwest Airlines flies 44% of ONT’s departures. An airline brings its own schedule, aircraft and habits to an airport, so part of every gap above is a gap between carriers.
• Different destinations. 28% of LAX’s departures and 1% of SNA’s departures go to places no other airport here serves. An on-time arrival is counted at the far end, so weather and congestion at the destination are in the figure.
• Different trip lengths. The average route, weighted by flights, is 1,314 miles from LAX, 795 miles from SNA, 537 miles from BUR, and 737 miles from ONT. Short regional hops and long coast-to-coast flights fail in different ways.
• Ground time belongs to the airport. Taxi-out and the share of flights that push back on time measure the airport itself. On-time arrival measures the whole trip.
• Airports left out. Long Beach International Airport (LGB) is in the same city market but not among the airports FlyerIntel covers, so it is not compared.
• History, not a forecast. These are flights from July 2023 – July 2026. A storm cancels hundreds of flights together, so a clear gap is a statement about this sample, not a promise about your trip.

• New York (LGA, EWR, JFK)
• Chicago (ORD, MDW)
• Dallas–Fort Worth (DFW, DAL)
• Washington (DCA, BWI, IAD)
• San Francisco (SFO, SJC, OAK)
• Miami (MIA, FLL)
• Houston (IAH, HOU)