Carrier route record
OOMDW→DTW
SkyWest Airlines · Chicago to Detroit
- Flights
- 137
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 12%
- Carriers
- 2
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on MDW to DTW earns an A+. Close to nine flights in ten arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 14 points better than the national rate of 77.3%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 137 flights, with a median arrival 10 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, SkyWest's MDW to DTW record is 14 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 139 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
91.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 137 completed flights
Avg delay
64 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.00%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
75.9%
Every carrier on MDW to DTW, 1,183 flights
These figures cover 137 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. The median arrival is 10 minutes early, which is the part an average hides: most flights here are fine, and the on-time rate is decided by a tail of badly late ones. On-time means under 15 minutes late, the DOT's own threshold.
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Carrier by carrier
SkyWest against every carrier on MDW to DTW
SkyWest flew 137 of the 1,183 flights on MDW to DTW, about 12% of it. Its 91.2% on time is 15 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 75.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 91.2% to Southwest at 73.9%.
Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines (this page)thin sample | 137 | 91.2% | 64 min | 0.00% | A+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 1,046 | 73.9% | 55 min | 1.82% | C |
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Departure window
When SkyWest runs best on this route
Departure time is the single lever a traveller controls, and it moves the odds more than most people expect. Each bar below is the on-time rate for flights scheduled to leave inside that window, across 137 flights.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am64 flights90.6%
- 11am–2pm6 flights—
- 2pm–5pm—
- 5pm–8pm67 flights91.0%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 80% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is the strongest at 91.0% on time. The full set of windows spans half a point.
Across the year
SkyWest on MDW to DTW through the year
- Jul–Sep 202561 flights88.5%
- Oct–Dec 202576 flights93.4%
Scale runs 80% to 100%.
Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 91.2% on time across 137 flights.
Split by quarter, SkyWest on MDW to DTW logged 61 flights in Jul–Sep 2025 and 76 flights in Oct–Dec 2025. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 91.2% annual figure is the one to use.
Arrival by arrival
How late SkyWest on MDW to DTW runs when it is late
SkyWest on MDW to DTW often beats the schedule: 48 of 137 completed flights, 35%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 12 late arrivals split 2 under half an hour, 5 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 5 an hour or more.
- 15+ min early48 flights35.0%
- Within 15 min77 flights56.2%
- 15–29 min late2 flights1.5%
- 30–59 min late5 flights3.6%
- 1–2 hours late2 flights1.5%
- 2+ hours late3 flights2.2%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 137 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
Only 16 of 137 completed flights left 15 minutes late or more, too few to say how often the time is made up.
The worst days
Worst days for SkyWest on MDW to DTW
The latest arrival of the period was on 16 September 2025, 2 hours 11 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as carrier-caused (crew, maintenance, fuelling, baggage). Three of the five worst days fell in September 2025.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 16 September 2025 | 2 hours 11 minutes | Carrier |
| 13 September 2025 | 2 hours 3 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 10 September 2025 | 2 hours | Carrier |
| 12 October 2025 | 1 hour 40 minutes | Carrier |
| 2 October 2025 | 1 hour 4 minutes | Carrier |
Delay causes
Why SkyWest runs late on this route
Carrier accounts for 62% of the 771 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 62%Carrier
- 20%National Airspace System
- 18%Extreme weather
Extreme weather accounts for 18% 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 3.0 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 771 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 62%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 481 of the 771 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.00%, below the national 1.89% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Almost no flights are called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.6% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Connections built on this flight are about as safe as US domestic connections get, though a cancelled flight still ignores every layover you give it.
At 228 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 5pm–8pm window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 84.7% on time across 137 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. 137 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 SkyWest on MDW to DTW
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 137 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 91.2% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 137 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- MDW to DTW, every carrier
- SkyWest on DTW to MDW, the return leg
- Southwest Airlines on MDW to DTW73.9%
- SkyWest Airlines network-wide record
- Chicago Midway International (MDW) delay statistics
- Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County (DTW) delay statistics
- Late aircraft, weather, or the airline: what actually causes US flight delays
- How to read this site: grades, sample sizes, and honest caveats
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.