Carrier route record
B6JFK→ORD
JetBlue Airways · New York to Chicago
- Flights
- 572
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 28%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with JetBlue Airways.
JetBlue on JFK 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 572 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Republic Airways, flew 759 at 76.8% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so JetBlue on JFK to ORD runs 10 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 99 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
67.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 548 completed flights
Avg delay
82 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.85%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
71.5%
Every carrier on JFK to ORD, 2,013 flights
These figures cover 572 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 15.7% 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 JFK to ORD
JetBlue flew 572 of the 2,013 flights on JFK to ORD, about 28% of it. Its 67.7% on time is 4 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 71.5%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 76.8% to Frontier at 51.4%. 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 Airways | 759 | 76.8% | 83 min | 5.53% | B− |
| American Airlines | 552 | 73.0% | 89 min | 5.07% | C− |
| JetBlue Airways (this page) | 572 | 67.7% | 82 min | 3.85% | C− |
| Delta Air Linesthin sample | 14 | 61.5% | 266 min | 0.00% | D+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 116 | 51.4% | 101 min | 4.31% | F− |
Republic Airways cancels 5.5% 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 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 4 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am52 flights86.0%
- 8am–11am159 flights77.7%
- 11am–2pm29 flights—
- 2pm–5pm29 flights—
- 5pm–8pm120 flights55.7%
- 8pm–5am183 flights56.8%
Scale runs 45% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 55.7% on time, against 86.0% 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 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 183 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
JetBlue on JFK to ORD through the year
July is the worst month at 47.4% on time, 38 points below May, the best at 84.9%. 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. June was the busiest month here, with 82 flights.
Across the week, Friday is the strongest day at 76.8% on time and Sunday the weakest at 60.0%. 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 15,000 reported delay minutes.
- 35%Late-arriving aircraft
- 33%National Airspace System
- 28%Carrier
- 2%Extreme weather
- 2%Security
35% 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 15,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 20 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 14,529 reported delay minutes.
33% 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 4,864 minutes out of 15,000, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations run at 3.85%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in 25 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. 15.7% 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 740 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 is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 81.8% on time across 571 flights, 14 points above 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 14 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 572 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 JFK to ORD
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.85% 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. 548 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- JFK to ORD, every carrier
- JetBlue on ORD to JFK, the return leg
- Republic Airways on JFK to ORD76.8%
- American Airlines on JFK to ORD73.0%
- Frontier Airlines on JFK to ORD51.4%
- JetBlue Airways network-wide record
- John F. Kennedy International (JFK) delay statistics
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
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.