Carrier route record
NKLGA→ORD
Spirit Airlines · New York to Chicago
- Flights
- 330
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 3%
- Carriers
- 6
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.
Spirit on LGA to ORD draws a D−. Roughly 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 330 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 2,296 at 68.6% on time.
Delta Air Lines is the most reliable of the four carriers covered here at 68.6% on time across 2,296 flights.
Key figures
On time
62.1%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 306 completed flights
Avg delay
95 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
7.27%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
67.3%
Every carrier on LGA to ORD, 11,625 flights
These figures cover 330 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 20.6% 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
Spirit against every carrier on LGA to ORD
Spirit flew 330 of the 11,625 flights on LGA to ORD, about 3% of it. Its 62.1% on time is 5 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 67.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number five of six carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 68.6% to SkyWest at 61.8%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The four carriers here are closely matched: 2 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delta Air Lines | 2,296 | 68.6% | 96 min | 4.75% | C− |
| Republic Airways | 1,298 | 68.6% | 62 min | 9.32% | C− |
| American Airlines | 2,947 | 67.5% | 94 min | 4.48% | C− |
| United Airlines | 4,662 | 66.7% | 88 min | 3.69% | C− |
| Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample | 330 | 62.1% | 95 min | 7.27% | D− |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 92 | 61.8% | 90 min | 17.39% | D− |
Republic Airways cancels 9.3% 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 Spirit runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 40 points, against 2 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am92 flights69.0%
- 8am–11am26 flights—
- 11am–2pm40 flights53.8%
- 2pm–5pm55 flights83.3%
- 5pm–8pm78 flights43.1%
- 8pm–5am39 flights61.1%
Scale runs 35% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 43.1% on time, against 83.3% for the 2pm–5pm 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 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 92 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Spirit on LGA to ORD through the year
- Jul–Sep 202577 flights67.1%
- Oct–Dec 2025134 flights60.5%
- Jan–Mar 202690 flights61.2%
- Apr–Jun 202629 flights—
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 62.1% on time across 330 flights.
Quarter by quarter Spirit on LGA to ORD held fairly steady: 67.1% in Jul–Sep 2025, 60.5% in Oct–Dec 2025 and 61.2% in Jan–Mar 2026. A spread of 7 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 73.5% on time and Sunday the weakest at 48.8%. 25 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Spirit runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. National Airspace System accounts for 62% of the 11,000 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.
- 62%National Airspace System
- 19%Late-arriving aircraft
- 19%Carrier
- 0%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
62% 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 6,768 minutes out of 11,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 11,003 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations run at 7.27%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly 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. 20.6% 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 733 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 55.3% on time across 330 flights, 7 points below 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 7 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 330 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 Spirit on LGA to ORD
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 7.27% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 2pm–5pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 306 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- LGA to ORD, every carrier
- Spirit on ORD to LGA, the return leg
- Delta Air Lines on LGA to ORD68.6%
- Republic Airways on LGA to ORD68.6%
- American Airlines on LGA to ORD67.5%
- United Airlines on LGA to ORD66.7%
- Spirit Airlines network-wide record
- LaGuardia (LGA) delay statistics
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.