Carrier route record
MQMCI→ORD
Envoy Air · Kansas City to Chicago
- Flights
- 819
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 20%
- Carriers
- 6
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Envoy Air.
Envoy on MCI to ORD carries a cancellation problem, not just a delay problem: 3.7% of scheduled flights never operate, against 1.8% nationally. Of the ones that do fly, close to three flights in four arrive on time, worth a C− overall. The punctuality figure counts only flights that actually departed, so it flatters an operation that cancels this often. That rests on 819 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Republic Airways, flew 570 at 81.8% on time.
Republic Airways is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 81.8% on time across 570 flights.
Key figures
On time
73.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 787 completed flights
Avg delay
74 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.66%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
74.7%
Every carrier on MCI to ORD, 4,148 flights
These figures cover 819 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 10.7% 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
Envoy against every carrier on MCI to ORD
Envoy flew 819 of the 4,148 flights on MCI to ORD, about 20% of it. Its 73.8% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 74.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of six carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 81.8% to PSA at 51.4%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Republic Airways arrives on time 81.8% of the time; SkyWest Airlines manages 69.5%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 943 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Republic Airways | 570 | 81.8% | 118 min | 1.58% | B |
| United Airlines | 1,434 | 76.5% | 82 min | 2.02% | B |
| Envoy Air (this page) | 819 | 73.8% | 74 min | 3.66% | C− |
| American Airlinesthin sample | 342 | 73.5% | 135 min | 2.92% | C |
| SkyWest Airlines | 943 | 69.5% | 112 min | 3.71% | C− |
| PSA Airlinesthin sample | 40 | 51.4% | 122 min | 7.50% | F− |
SkyWest Airlines cancels 3.7% 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 Envoy runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 29 points, against 12 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am125 flights87.1%
- 8am–11am70 flights81.4%
- 11am–2pm151 flights77.0%
- 2pm–5pm189 flights74.4%
- 5pm–8pm200 flights58.3%
- 8pm–5am84 flights76.7%
Scale runs 50% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 58.3% on time, against 87.1% 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 200 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Envoy on MCI to ORD through the year
January is the weak month at 53.3% on time, against 90.3% in February. 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. April was the busiest month here, with 118 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 77.2% on time and Monday the weakest at 69.7%. 8 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Envoy runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 46% of the 15,000 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.
- 46%Late-arriving aircraft
- 29%National Airspace System
- 16%Extreme weather
- 9%Carrier
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 16% of delay minutes, well above the single-digit share typical across the system. Weather delays are lumpy: they arrive as whole bad days rather than as a steady drag, so the monthly strip above is the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 2.5 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 15,247 reported delay minutes.
46% 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 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.
Cancellations run at 3.66%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly 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. 10.7% 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.
At 403 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 74.2% on time across 820 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. 819 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 Envoy on MCI to ORD
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.66% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; 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. 787 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- MCI to ORD, every carrier
- Envoy on ORD to MCI, the return leg
- Republic Airways on MCI to ORD81.8%
- United Airlines on MCI to ORD76.5%
- American Airlines on MCI to ORD73.5%
- SkyWest Airlines on MCI to ORD69.5%
- Envoy Air network-wide record
- Kansas City International (MCI) delay statistics
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
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.