South Carolina

What the Data Says About Flying in South Carolina

South Carolina (SC) has 6 airports tracked in the Bureau of Transportation Statistics on-time performance dataset, which together handled 699,538 flights. Across those flights, the statewide on-time rate comes in at 82.4%, with 8,887 cancellations producing a 1.27% cancellation rate. The average delay when a flight runs late is 2.6 minutes. Together these numbers are the most useful summary of what air travel through South Carolina airports looks like in aggregate, and they provide the baseline for comparing individual airports against each other and against national averages.

The busiest airport in South Carolina is Charleston, SC (CHS) in Charleston, which handled 276,798 flights at a 81.4% on-time rate and an average delay of 74.9 minutes. On the reliability front, Columbia, SC (CAE) posts the highest on-time rate at 84.3% across 67,973 flights — worth comparing if you have flexibility on origin or destination airport within South Carolina. Performance can differ sharply between a state's biggest hub and its smaller airports, so airport-level pages are the right place to dig into specifics.

Why the spread? Delays in South Carolina — as everywhere in the BTS dataset — break down into five categories: late-arriving aircraft, carrier issues like maintenance and crew, National Aviation System constraints such as air traffic control and airspace congestion, weather, and security. The relative mix changes by airport and season: a small regional airport may see weather dominate, while a major hub tends to lean on late-aircraft and NAS delays. For travelers choosing flights through South Carolina, the combination of a 82.4% statewide on-time rate, 2.6-minute average delay, and 1.27% cancellation rate is the concrete benchmark to weigh against specific airports and carriers.