Carrier route record

AACID→ORD

American Airlines · Cedar Rapids to Chicago

Flights: 126
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 5%
Carriers: 5

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

American on CID to ORD earns an A−. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 9 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 126 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Envoy Air, flew 965 at 75.8% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, American's CID to ORD record is 9 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 91 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

86.7%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 120 completed flights

Avg delay

58 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

4.76%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

72.1%

Every carrier on CID to ORD, 2,715 flights

These figures cover 126 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 9 minutes early, which is the part an average hides: most flights here are fine, and the on-time rate is decided by a tail of badly late ones. On-time means under 15 minutes late, the DOT's own threshold.

Carrier by carrier

American against every carrier on CID to ORD

American flew 126 of the 2,715 flights on CID to ORD, about 5% of it. Its 86.7% on time is 15 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 72.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from American at 86.7% to SkyWest at 65.6%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Envoy Air arrives on time 75.8% of the time; SkyWest Airlines manages 65.6%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 812 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on CID to ORD
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
American Airlines (this page)thin sample	126	86.7%	58 min	4.76%	A−
Envoy Air	965	75.8%	70 min	2.69%	B
United Airlines	457	75.4%	78 min	2.19%	B
Republic Airwaysthin sample	354	66.9%	79 min	6.21%	C−
SkyWest Airlines	812	65.6%	115 min	4.56%	C−

SkyWest Airlines cancels 4.6% 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 is the single lever a traveller controls, and it moves the odds more than most people expect. Each bar below is the on-time rate for flights scheduled to leave inside that window, across 126 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split American's CID to ORD record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 86.7% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

American on CID to ORD through the year

Oct–Dec 20251 flights—
Jan–Mar 202636 flights79.4%
Apr–Jun 202689 flights89.4%

Scale runs 70% to 95%. 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 86.7% on time across 126 flights.

Split by quarter, American on CID to ORD logged 1 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 36 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 89 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 86.7% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why American runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 48% of the 931 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.

Carrier
48%
National Airspace System
31%
Extreme weather
18%
Late-arriving aircraft
3%

Extreme weather accounts for 18% 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 2.9 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 931 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 48%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 451 of the 931 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations run at 4.76%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in twenty cancelled outright. A cancelled flight is invisible in every on-time figure on this page, so the punctuality numbers above describe only the flights that actually operated.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

5.0% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last about an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.

At 196 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 is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 60.3% on time across 127 flights, 26 points below this direction. Departure banks, aircraft rotations and the congestion at each end all differ, so scoring the two directions together would average away a real 26 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 126 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 CID to ORD

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.76% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you about an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 5am–8am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 120 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