Carrier route record
B6JFK→ORD
JetBlue Airways · New York to Chicago
- Flights
- 634
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 30%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with JetBlue Airways.
JetBlue on JFK to ORD draws a D−. 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 634 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Republic Airways, flew 830 at 76.3% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so JetBlue on JFK to ORD runs 13 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 133 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
64.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 583 completed flights
Avg delay
85 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
7.57%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
70.4%
Every carrier on JFK to ORD, 2,136 flights
These figures cover 634 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 17.8% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
Fare search by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.
Carrier by carrier
JetBlue against every carrier on JFK to ORD
JetBlue flew 634 of the 2,136 flights on JFK to ORD, about 30% of it. Its 64.0% on time is 6 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 70.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 76.3% 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: 3 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 | 830 | 76.3% | 77 min | 5.78% | B− |
| American Airlines | 542 | 73.1% | 91 min | 5.17% | C− |
| JetBlue Airways (this page) | 634 | 64.0% | 85 min | 7.57% | D− |
| 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 5.8% 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 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 31 points, against 3 points between the best and worst carrier.
- 5am–8am114 flights79.2%
- 8am–11am97 flights77.9%
- 11am–2pm29 flights—
- 2pm–5pm91 flights48.1%
- 5pm–8pm129 flights53.7%
- 8pm–5am174 flights55.6%
Scale runs 40% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 79.2% of the time, against 48.1% for the afternoon window. That is 31 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 174 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
JetBlue on JFK to ORD through the year
August is the worst month at 46.3% on time, 39 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. July was the busiest month here, with 93 flights.
Across the week, Friday is the strongest day at 70.1% on time and Sunday the weakest at 56.5%, a spread of 14 points.
Arrival by arrival
How late JetBlue on JFK to ORD runs when it is late
JetBlue on JFK to ORD often beats the schedule: 163 of 583 completed flights, 28%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 210 late arrivals split 51 under half an hour, 55 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 104 an hour or more.
- 15+ min early163 flights28.0%
- Within 15 min210 flights36.0%
- 15–29 min late51 flights8.7%
- 30–59 min late55 flights9.4%
- 1–2 hours late62 flights10.6%
- 2+ hours late42 flights7.2%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 583 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
25 of 190 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 13% of them. In the other direction, 45 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 JetBlue on JFK to ORD
The latest arrival of the period was on 6 September 2025, 7 hours 39 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. The same cause led on three of the five worst days.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 6 September 2025 | 7 hours 39 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 3 July 2026 | 7 hours 27 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 31 August 2026 | 7 hours 13 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 12 June 2026 | 5 hours 51 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 21 July 2026 | 5 hours 14 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
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 18,000 reported delay minutes.
- 39%National Airspace System
- 35%Late-arriving aircraft
- 23%Carrier
- 1%Security
- 1%Extreme weather
35% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 18,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 26 to one. The split is drawn from 17,874 reported delay minutes.
39% 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 6,951 minutes out of 18,000, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations run at 7.57%, against 1.89% nationally. That is roughly one flight in twelve 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
17.8% 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.
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.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 78.2% on time across 633 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. 634 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 7.57% 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. 583 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 ORD76.3%
- American Airlines on JFK to ORD73.1%
- 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, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.