Carrier route record
B6BOS→ORD
JetBlue Airways · Boston to Chicago
- Flights
- 533
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 7%
- Carriers
- 6
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with JetBlue Airways.
JetBlue on BOS to ORD sits in the middle of the pack with a C. Close to three flights in four arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 4 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. The late ones land a little over an hour behind schedule. That rests on 533 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Envoy Air, flew 445 at 75.6% on time.
Envoy Air is the most reliable of the five carriers covered here at 75.6% on time across 445 flights.
Key figures
On time
73.6%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 519 completed flights
Avg delay
68 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.25%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
72.7%
Every carrier on BOS to ORD, 7,637 flights
These figures cover 533 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 10.6% 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
JetBlue against every carrier on BOS to ORD
JetBlue flew 533 of the 7,637 flights on BOS to ORD, about 7% of it. Its 73.6% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 72.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of six carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 75.6% to Delta at 65.2%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Envoy Air arrives on time 75.6% of the time; Delta Air Lines manages 65.2%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 962 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Air | 445 | 75.6% | 91 min | 3.60% | B− |
| United Airlines | 2,678 | 75.0% | 85 min | 1.90% | B |
| JetBlue Airways (this page) | 533 | 73.6% | 68 min | 2.25% | C |
| American Airlines | 2,125 | 73.4% | 93 min | 2.82% | C |
| Republic Airways | 894 | 70.4% | 81 min | 5.93% | C− |
| Delta Air Lines | 962 | 65.2% | 75 min | 3.12% | C− |
Republic Airways cancels 5.9% 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.
Flight by flight
JetBlue flight numbers on BOS to ORD
Departure window
When JetBlue runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 30 points, against 10 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am199 flights86.1%
- 8am–11am81 flights77.8%
- 11am–2pm33 flights81.2%
- 2pm–5pm133 flights61.9%
- 5pm–8pm87 flights55.8%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 45% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 55.8% on time, against 86.1% for the 5am–8am slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 199 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
JetBlue on BOS to ORD through the year
January is the weak month at 63.3% on time, against 83.7% in July. Winter delays cluster: a single storm system can account for most of a month's shortfall, so an average December hides both very good weeks and genuinely unflyable days. October was the busiest month here, with 58 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 82.0% on time and Friday the weakest at 65.5%. 17 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why JetBlue runs late on this route
Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 9,326 reported delay minutes.
- 41%National Airspace System
- 31%Carrier
- 26%Late-arriving aircraft
- 3%Extreme weather
41% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 3,786 minutes out of 9,326, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 9,326 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations sit at 2.25% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.38%.
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. 10.6% 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.
The 867 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 return leg runs 73.5% on time across 534 flights, within half a point 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. 533 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 JetBlue on BOS to ORD
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 533 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 73.6% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 519 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- BOS to ORD, every carrier
- JetBlue on ORD to BOS, the return leg
- Envoy Air on BOS to ORD75.6%
- United Airlines on BOS to ORD75.0%
- American Airlines on BOS to ORD73.4%
- Republic Airways on BOS to ORD70.4%
- Delta Air Lines on BOS to ORD65.2%
- JetBlue Airways network-wide record
- Boston Logan International (BOS) delay statistics
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.