Route reliability record
LIT→ORD
Little Rock to Chicago
- Flights
- 1,404
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 552 mi
- Carriers
- 3
This route draws a C. 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 1,404 LIT to ORD flights, of which Envoy Air flew 952 at 71.1% on time.
Best time to fly LIT to ORD: a 8am–11am departure, ideally on a Thursday. Flights in that window arrived on time 82.4% of the time and Thursday flights 75.1%, against 67.8% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so this route runs 10 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 98 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
67.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,358 completed flights
Avg delay
77 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.85%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
Envoy
71.1% on time across 952 flights
These figures cover 1,404 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 12.9% 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 LIT to ORD
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Envoy Air arrives on time 71.1% of the time; SkyWest Airlines manages 61.0%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 437 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Air | 952 | 71.1% | 68 min | 1.68% | C |
| SkyWest Airlines | 437 | 61.0% | 91 min | 4.81% | D− |
| Republic Airwaysthin sample | 15 | 50.0% | 86 min | 20.00% | F− |
SkyWest Airlines cancels 4.8% 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.
Flight by flight
Flights on LIT to ORD
The flight numbers below flew this route at least 250 times in the period, busiest first. Each has its own record, with its schedule and delay causes.
Best ways to make this trip
The most reliable ways to fly Little Rock to Chicago
Every airline on this route, ranked by how often a scheduled flight actually operated and arrived on time, with its best departure time and most punctual flight number. No nearby airport pair beat these.
| Option | Airline | Success | On time | Cancelled | Best departure | Most punctual flight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. LIT → ORDLittle Rock to Chicago | Envoy Air | 69.9% | 71.1% | 1.68% | 8am–11am, Tue | MQ 3656 07:05 |
| 2. LIT → ORDLittle Rock to Chicago | SkyWest Airlines | 58.1% | 61.0% | 4.81% | 11am–2pm, Thu | — |
Success is the share of scheduled flights that operated and arrived less than 15 minutes late, so a cancelled flight counts against it. “(route)” means the best time comes from every carrier on the route rather than this airline alone.
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 25 points, against 10 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am353 flights74.9%
- 8am–11am35 flights82.4%
- 11am–2pm454 flights69.3%
- 2pm–5pm168 flights68.7%
- 5pm–8pm390 flights57.5%
- 8pm–5am4 flights—
Scale runs 50% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 57.5% on time, against 82.4% for the 8am–11am 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 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 454 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 26 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.
December is the weak month at 53.6% on time, against 79.2% in September. Winter delays cluster: a single storm system can account for most of a month's shortfall, so an average December hides both very good weeks and genuinely unflyable days. June was the busiest month here, with 156 flights.
Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 75.1% on time and Sunday the weakest at 58.5%. 17 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 34,000 reported delay minutes.
- 34%Late-arriving aircraft
- 32%Carrier
- 23%National Airspace System
- 11%Extreme weather
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 34,000 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. The split is drawn from 33,549 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 82.4% on time here.
Cancellations run at 2.85%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly one flight in 40 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 actually costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 12.9% 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 552 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 74.8% on time across 1,406 flights, 7 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 7 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,404 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in ORD after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 2.85% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 8am–11am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 1,358 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
LIT to ORD questions
How often is LIT 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 32.2% of the 1,404 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
Which airline is most reliable on LIT to ORD?
Envoy Air leads at 71.1% on time across 952 flights. SkyWest Airlines is at the other end on 61.0%, a gap of 10 points. Sample size matters as much as the percentage: a rate built from a few hundred flights moves around far more than one built from ten thousand.
What time of day has the fewest delays on LIT to ORD?
The 8am–11am departure window is the strongest at 82.4% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 57.5%, 25 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 December delays on LIT to ORD?
December is the weakest month at 53.6% on time, compared with 79.2% in September. Across the year that is 26 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 LIT — the return legseparate record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Envoy Air on LIT to ORD71.1%
- SkyWest Airlines on LIT to ORD61.0%
- LIT to DFW, a related route73.2%
- LGA to ORD, a related route67.3%
- LIT to ATL, a related route89.1%
- Envoy Air on-time record71.1%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record61.0%
- Republic Airways on-time record50.0%
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
Direction matters. LIT to ORD and ORD to LIT are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.