Route reliability record
GEG→ORD
Spokane to Chicago
- Flights
- 744
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 1,498 mi
- Carriers
- 3
This route draws a D. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 744 GEG to ORD flights, with a median arrival 4 minutes late.
Best time to fly GEG to ORD: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Thursday. Flights in that window arrived on time 80.8% of the time and Thursday flights 73.0%, against 64.2% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so this route runs 13 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 134 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
64.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 727 completed flights
Avg delay
79 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.08%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
68.6% on time across 391 flights
These figures cover 744 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 12.1% 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
Which airline is most reliable on GEG to ORD
Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlinesthin sample | 2 | 100.0% | — | 0.00% | A+ |
| SkyWest Airlines | 391 | 68.6% | 55 min | 1.53% | C |
| American Airlinesthin sample | 351 | 59.2% | 100 min | 0.57% | D+ |
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 23 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am184 flights80.8%
- 8am–11am1 flights—
- 11am–2pm500 flights58.2%
- 2pm–5pm44 flights65.9%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am15 flights—
Scale runs 50% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 58.2% on time against 80.8% for 5am–8am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 500 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 24 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
August is the worst month at 53.8% on time, 24 points below January, the best at 77.5%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. July was the busiest month here, with 92 flights.
Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 73.0% on time and Friday the weakest at 58.7%. 14 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
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 21,000 reported delay minutes.
- 41%Carrier
- 34%Late-arriving aircraft
- 13%National Airspace System
- 11%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 11% 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 1.8 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 20,645 reported delay minutes.
34% 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 21,000 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 1.08% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 1.21%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 12.1% 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 1,498 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 64.7% on time across 744 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. 744 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in ORD after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 744 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 64.2% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 727 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
GEG to ORD questions
How often is GEG to ORD delayed?
About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 35.8% of the 744 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
How reliable is GEG to ORD compared with the rest of the country?
64.2% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 13 points against it. That is worth a D on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on GEG to ORD?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 80.8% on time. The 11am–2pm window is the weakest at 58.2%, 23 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are August delays on GEG to ORD?
August is the weakest month at 53.8% on time, compared with 77.5% in January. Across the year that is 24 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to GEG — the return legseparate record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- SkyWest Airlines on GEG to ORD68.6%
- American Airlines on GEG to ORD59.2%
- GEG to SEA, a related route85.9%
- LGA to ORD, a related route67.3%
- GEG to DEN, a related route83.8%
- United Airlines on-time record100.0%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record68.6%
- American Airlines on-time record59.2%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
Direction matters. GEG to ORD and ORD to GEG are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
Embed GEG to ORD’s on-time badge on your site
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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.