Carrier route record

AABNA→ORD

American Airlines · Nashville to Chicago

Flights: 384
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 8%
Carriers: 9

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with American Airlines.

American on BNA to ORD draws a C. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is close to two hours behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 384 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Republic Airways, flew 562 at 73.4% on time.

Republic Airways is the most reliable of the four carriers covered here at 73.4% on time across 562 flights.

On time

65.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 377 completed flights

Avg delay

120 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.82%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

70.4%

Every carrier on BNA to ORD, 5,024 flights

These figures cover 384 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 19.6% 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.

Carrier by carrier

American against every carrier on BNA to ORD

American flew 384 of the 5,024 flights on BNA to ORD, about 8% of it. Its 65.5% on time is 5 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 70.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of nine carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 76.7% to American at 65.5%. Four of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Republic Airways arrives on time 73.4% of the time; SkyWest Airlines manages 65.9%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,467 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on BNA to ORD
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Southwest Airlinesthin sample	338	76.7%	59 min	1.48%	B
Republic Airways	562	73.4%	80 min	2.14%	C
Envoy Air	782	73.0%	75 min	3.84%	C−
United Airlines	1,380	72.3%	93 min	2.10%	C
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	81	67.9%	82 min	3.70%	C−
Spirit Airlinesthin sample	27	66.7%	45 min	0.00%	C+
PSA Airlinesthin sample	3	66.7%	30 min	0.00%	C+
SkyWest Airlines	1,467	65.9%	102 min	3.68%	C−
American Airlines (this page)	384	65.5%	120 min	1.82%	C

Envoy Air cancels 3.8% of what it schedules here, the highest in the table. A cancelled flight never appears in an on-time rate, so read that column alongside the punctuality one rather than after it.

Departure window

When American runs best on this route

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 39 points, against 8 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am103 flights81.8%
8am–11am88 flights78.2%
11am–2pm35 flights80.0%
2pm–5pm47 flights42.6%
5pm–8pm111 flights45.9%
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 35% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 81.8% of the time, against 42.6% for the afternoon window. That is 39 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 111 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

American on BNA to ORD through the year

Jul–Sep 2025226 flights61.3%
Oct–Dec 202593 flights73.1%
Jan–Mar 202621 flights—
Apr–Jun 202644 flights60.5%

Scale runs 50% to 80%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 65.5% on time across 384 flights.

American on BNA to ORD did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Oct–Dec 2025 at 73.1% on time and its weakest Apr–Jun 2026 at 60.5%, a swing of 13 points on roughly 128 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.

Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 77.1% on time and Monday the weakest at 54.1%. 23 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why American runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 53% of the 16,000 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.

Late-arriving aircraft
53%
National Airspace System
18%
Extreme weather
16%
Carrier
13%

Extreme weather accounts for 16% 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 2.5 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 15,553 reported delay minutes.

53% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. That is a cascade, and cascades start small and grow through the day. Across 16,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 3 to one. It is the strongest argument for booking the first departure of the morning, when the aircraft has been sitting at the gate overnight with nothing to inherit.

Cancellations sit at 1.82% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 19.6% 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.

At 409 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.

The return leg runs 63.8% on time across 382 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.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 384 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 American on BNA to ORD

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 384 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 65.5% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 377 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

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.

Key figures