Flight number record
UA 1046
United Airlines · Atlanta to Chicago
- Route
- ATL → ORD
- Departs
- 18:59
- Flights
- 341
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s UA 1046, check with United Airlines.
UA 1046 draws a D. Roughly one flight in two arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is an hour and a half behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 341 flights, with a median arrival 10 minutes late.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so UA 1046 runs 19 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 187 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
58.9%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 333 completed flights
Avg delay
99 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.35%
National rate is 1.81%
1 hour+ late
16.2%
National rate is 8.1%
These figures cover 341 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 16.2% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.
Schedule
When UA 1046 flies
UA 1046 flies ATL to ORD without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 18:59, used on 68 of 341 flights, with 18:47 (47 flights) and 18:50 (45 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.
- Departs 18:5968 flights19.9%
- Departs 18:4747 flights13.8%
- Departs 18:5045 flights13.2%
Scale runs 0% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Share of scheduled departures at each local time. Times used on fewer than one flight in ten are not listed.
A 18:59 departure sits in the 5pm–8pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 68.2%, and UA 1046 runs 9 points worse at 58.9%. By that time of day most aircraft have flown several legs already, and whatever went wrong earlier is still in the schedule.
Against the route
UA 1046 next to ATL to ORD
Every carrier on ATL to ORD combined arrived on time 70.6% of the time across 6,406 flights, so UA 1046 is 12 points behind it. United flew 1,611 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 74.3% on time. Across its whole network United Airlines managed 79.0%, which this flight trails by 20 points.
| Compared with | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UA 1046thin sample | 341 | 58.9% | 99 min | 2.35% | D |
| All United Airlines on ATL–ORD | 1,611 | 74.3% | 92 min | 1.55% | C |
| All carriers on ATL–ORD | 6,406 | 70.6% | 81 min | 2.34% | C |
| United Airlines, whole network | 821,041 | 79.0% | 72 min | 1.01% | B |
Across the year
UA 1046 quarter by quarter
UA 1046 did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Apr–Jun 2026 at 65.2% on time and its weakest Oct–Dec 2025 at 54.3%, a swing of 11 points on roughly 85 flights a quarter. The twelve-month rate averages over that, so if you are flying in a weak quarter the quarter's own figure is the better guide.
- Jul–Sep 202591 flights54.4%
- Oct–Dec 202573 flights54.3%
- Jan–Mar 202686 flights60.7%
- Apr–Jun 202691 flights65.2%
Scale runs 45% to 70%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
By weekday, UA 1046 did best on Tuesday at 68.8% on time and worst on Thursday at 47.9%. Each day rests on about 49 flights, so a gap of 21 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.
Delay causes
Why UA 1046 runs late
One category carries most of the weight here. National Airspace System accounts for 53% of the 14,000 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.
- 53%National Airspace System
- 25%Late-arriving aircraft
- 13%Extreme weather
- 9%Carrier
Extreme weather accounts for 13% 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 quarterly figures above are the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 2.1 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 13,549 delay minutes reported on UA 1046.
Cancellations sit at 2.35% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
Connections and routes
What a delay on this flight costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 16.2% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
The 606 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 same number turns up on four other city pairs in the data, including ORD to MSP (17), SFO to ATL (16) and PBI to ORD (4), but none flew often enough under UA 1046 to report a rate for. Carriers move flight numbers between routes, so the figures on this page apply to ATL to ORD only.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 341 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor but not enough to pin the rate down tightly, and a single bad week moves it by more than a point. Treat the grade as a rough reading.
What to do with this
Booking UA 1046
For a booking, UA 1046 is a flight to put a long connection behind. 16.2% of its completed flights arrived an hour or more late, which a short layover will not absorb. If the onward flight is on a separate ticket, the risk sits with you.
Related
Where to go next
- ATL to ORD, every carrier and departure
- ORD to ATL, the return direction
- Delta Air Lines 2738 on the same route60.6%
- United Airlines 516 on the same route72.9%
- Delta Air Lines 1147 on the same route79.2%
- Frontier Airlines 1441 on the same route70.8%
- Delta Air Lines 2879 on the same route46.8%
- Delta Air Lines 1178 on the same route88.0%
- Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL) delay statistics
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- United Airlines on-time record
- Every United Airlines flight number with a record
- The most and least reliable flight numbers in the US
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
A flight number here means United Airlines’s own number as it reports to the DOT. How the figures are computed is on the methodology page.
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.