Carrier route record
YXMCI→ORD
Republic Airways · Kansas City to Chicago
- Flights
- 570
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 14%
- Carriers
- 6
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Republic Airways.
Republic on MCI to ORD lands a B, 4 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. Roughly one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by close to two hours on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 570 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 1,434 at 76.5% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Republic's MCI to ORD record is 4 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 42 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
81.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 561 completed flights
Avg delay
118 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.58%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
74.7%
Every carrier on MCI to ORD, 4,148 flights
These figures cover 570 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 8.7% 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
Republic against every carrier on MCI to ORD
Republic flew 570 of the 4,148 flights on MCI to ORD, about 14% of it. Its 81.8% on time is 7 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 74.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first 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. United Airlines arrives on time 76.5% 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 (this page) | 570 | 81.8% | 118 min | 1.58% | B |
| United Airlines | 1,434 | 76.5% | 82 min | 2.02% | B |
| Envoy Air | 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 Republic runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 16 points, against 7 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am74 flights86.1%
- 8am–11am120 flights90.8%
- 11am–2pm134 flights82.6%
- 2pm–5pm132 flights74.6%
- 5pm–8pm110 flights76.6%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 65% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 90.8% of the time, against 74.6% for the afternoon window. That is 16 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 134 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Republic on MCI to ORD through the year
December is the weak month at 69.7% on time, against 96.0% in January. 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. December was the busiest month here, with 99 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 86.7% on time and Monday the weakest at 76.2%. 11 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Republic 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 12,000 reported delay minutes.
- 35%National Airspace System
- 31%Late-arriving aircraft
- 22%Carrier
- 12%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 12% 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 2.0 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 12,011 reported delay minutes.
35% 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 4,171 minutes out of 12,000, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations sit at 1.58% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
8.7% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last close to two hours, which a normal layover absorbs.
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 8am–11am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 77.2% on time across 567 flights, 5 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 5 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 570 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 Republic on MCI to ORD
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 570 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 81.8% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 561 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- MCI to ORD, every carrier
- Republic on ORD to MCI, the return leg
- United Airlines on MCI to ORD76.5%
- Envoy Air on MCI to ORD73.8%
- American Airlines on MCI to ORD73.5%
- SkyWest Airlines on MCI to ORD69.5%
- Republic Airways network-wide record
- Kansas City International (MCI) delay statistics
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- Connecting flights: how much buffer the data says you need
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.