Carrier route record
OODAY→ORD
SkyWest Airlines · Dayton to Chicago
- Flights
- 621
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 34%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on DAY to ORD draws a D−. Roughly 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 621 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Envoy Air, flew 464 at 78.7% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so SkyWest on DAY to ORD runs 15 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 149 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
62.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 582 completed flights
Avg delay
101 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
6.28%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
72.7%
Every carrier on DAY to ORD, 1,810 flights
These figures cover 621 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 21.0% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
SkyWest against every carrier on DAY to ORD
SkyWest flew 621 of the 1,810 flights on DAY to ORD, about 34% of it. Its 62.4% on time is 10 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 72.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 90.6% to SkyWest at 62.4%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 4 points separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Republic Airwaysthin sample | 95 | 90.6% | 106 min | 10.53% | A− |
| United Airlinesthin sample | 69 | 80.9% | 44 min | 1.45% | B |
| Envoy Air | 464 | 78.7% | 89 min | 3.02% | B− |
| PSA Airlines | 561 | 75.0% | 111 min | 4.28% | B− |
| SkyWest Airlines (this page) | 621 | 62.4% | 101 min | 6.28% | D− |
PSA Airlines cancels 4.3% 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.
Timetable by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.
Departure window
When SkyWest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 21 points, against 4 points between the best and worst carrier.
- 5am–8am46 flights73.3%
- 8am–11am79 flights77.3%
- 11am–2pm75 flights66.7%
- 2pm–5pm193 flights58.7%
- 5pm–8pm228 flights56.4%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 50% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 56.4% on time, against 77.3% for the 8am–11am 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 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 228 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
SkyWest on DAY to ORD through the year
February is the weak month at 48.7% on time, against 71.4% 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. July was the busiest month here, with 119 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 72.9% on time and Sunday the weakest at 50.0%, a spread of 23 points.
Arrival by arrival
How late SkyWest on DAY to ORD runs when it is late
SkyWest on DAY to ORD often beats the schedule: 156 of 582 completed flights, 27%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. When SkyWest on DAY to ORD is late it tends to be very late: 122 of its 219 late arrivals were an hour or more behind, and 62 were two hours or more.
- 15+ min early156 flights26.8%
- Within 15 min207 flights35.6%
- 15–29 min late47 flights8.1%
- 30–59 min late50 flights8.6%
- 1–2 hours late60 flights10.3%
- 2+ hours late62 flights10.7%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 582 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
Time lost at the gate mostly stays lost. Of 186 departures that left 15 minutes late or more, only 19 made it up before arrival. In the other direction, 52 flights left on time yet arrived 15 minutes late or more, so that delay built up after pushback: in the air, in a holding pattern or on the ground at ORD.
The worst days
Worst days for SkyWest on DAY to ORD
The latest arrival of the period was on 4 July 2026, 15 hours 16 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as national airspace system delay. Three of the five worst days fell in November 2025.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 4 July 2026 | 15 hours 16 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 10 November 2025 | 8 hours 45 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 8 November 2025 | 7 hours 36 minutes | Carrier |
| 7 December 2025 | 7 hours 11 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 30 November 2025 | 6 hours 16 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
Delay causes
Why SkyWest 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 22,000 reported delay minutes.
- 31%Late-arriving aircraft
- 30%National Airspace System
- 29%Carrier
- 9%Extreme weather
The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 77.3% on time here. The split is drawn from 22,093 reported delay minutes.
No single cause dominates. late-arriving aircraft at 31%, national airspace system at 30% and carrier at 29% split the 22,000 reported delay minutes between them. An even spread like this usually means the operation is running close to its designed capacity with no one obvious weak point, and it is the hardest pattern for a traveller to route around.
Cancellations run at 6.28%, against 1.89% nationally. That is about one flight in fifteen 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
21.0% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
At 240 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 8am–11am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg runs 61.1% on time across 622 flights, within about 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. 621 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 SkyWest on DAY to ORD
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 6.28% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you close to two hours; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 8am–11am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 582 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DAY to ORD, every carrier
- SkyWest on ORD to DAY, the return leg
- Envoy Air on DAY to ORD78.7%
- PSA Airlines on DAY to ORD75.0%
- SkyWest Airlines network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- What a cancellation rate actually tells you (and what it hides)
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.