Carrier route record

AAIND→ORD

American Airlines · Indianapolis to Chicago

Flights: 514
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 10%
Carriers: 5

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

American on IND to ORD draws a C−. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is an hour and a half behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 514 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Republic Airways, flew 2,713 at 82.4% on time.

Republic Airways is the most reliable of the four carriers covered here at 82.4% on time across 2,713 flights.

On time

67.3%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 480 completed flights

Avg delay

87 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

6.42%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

76.5%

Every carrier on IND to ORD, 5,201 flights

These figures cover 514 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 15.4% 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 IND to ORD

American flew 514 of the 5,201 flights on IND to ORD, about 10% of it. Its 67.3% on time is 9 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 76.5%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number four of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 82.4% to SkyWest at 67.2%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Republic Airways arrives on time 82.4% of the time; SkyWest Airlines manages 67.2%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 649 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on IND to ORD
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Republic Airways	2,713	82.4%	70 min	2.06%	B
Envoy Air	576	77.6%	89 min	1.91%	B
United Airlines	749	67.8%	82 min	2.40%	C
American Airlines (this page)	514	67.3%	87 min	6.42%	C−
SkyWest Airlines	649	67.2%	109 min	6.32%	C−

SkyWest Airlines cancels 6.3% 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.

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 41 points, against 15 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am36 flights90.9%
8am–11am49 flights86.7%
11am–2pm84 flights85.0%
2pm–5pm44 flights70.5%
5pm–8pm225 flights57.6%
8pm–5am76 flights50.0%

Scale runs 40% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 50.0% on time, against 90.9% 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 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 225 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

American on IND to ORD through the year

Jul–Sep 202590 flights62.7%
Oct–Dec 202526 flights—
Jan–Mar 202648 flights56.8%
Apr–Jun 2026350 flights70.0%

Scale runs 50% to 75%. 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 67.3% on time across 514 flights.

American on IND to ORD did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Apr–Jun 2026 at 70.0% on time and its weakest Jan–Mar 2026 at 56.8%, a swing of 13 points on roughly 171 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 82.8% on time and Monday the weakest at 57.4%. 25 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 60% of the 14,000 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
60%
National Airspace System
26%
Extreme weather
10%
Carrier
4%

60% 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 14,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 6 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. The split is drawn from 13,633 reported delay minutes.

The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 90.9% on time here.

Cancellations run at 6.42%, against 1.81% 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

For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 15.4% 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 177 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 67.4% on time across 515 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. 514 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 IND to ORD

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 6.42% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; 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. 480 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