Carrier route record

OOORD→ALB

SkyWest Airlines · Chicago to Albany

Flights: 205
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 9%
Carriers: 4

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.

SkyWest on ORD to ALB sits in the middle of the pack with a C. Close to three flights in four arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 3 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. The late ones land an hour and a half behind schedule. That rests on 205 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Envoy Air, flew 756 at 79.1% on time.

Envoy Air is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 79.1% on time across 756 flights.

On time

74.4%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 199 completed flights

Avg delay

84 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

2.44%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

75.7%

Every carrier on ORD to ALB, 2,304 flights

These figures cover 205 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.5% 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

SkyWest against every carrier on ORD to ALB

SkyWest flew 205 of the 2,304 flights on ORD to ALB, about 9% of it. Its 74.4% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 75.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 79.1% to United at 73.7%.

The three carriers here are closely matched: 5 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.

On-time performance by carrier on ORD to ALB
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Envoy Air	756	79.1%	54 min	2.38%	B
SkyWest Airlines (this page)thin sample	205	74.4%	84 min	2.44%	C
Republic Airways	587	74.2%	71 min	4.09%	C−
United Airlines	756	73.7%	67 min	1.32%	C

Republic Airways cancels 4.1% 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 SkyWest runs best on this route

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 32 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am45 flights91.1%
8am–11am—
11am–2pm40 flights59.0%
2pm–5pm114 flights74.3%
5pm–8pm1 flights—
8pm–5am5 flights—

Scale runs 50% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 59.0% on time against 91.1% for 5am–8am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 114 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on ORD to ALB through the year

Jul–Sep 202524 flights—
Oct–Dec 202556 flights60.0%
Jan–Mar 20265 flights—
Apr–Jun 2026120 flights76.7%

Scale runs 50% to 80%. 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 74.4% on time across 205 flights.

Split by quarter, SkyWest on ORD to ALB logged 24 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 56 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 5 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 120 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 74.4% annual figure is the one to use.

Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 83.3% on time and Sunday the weakest at 61.3%. 22 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why SkyWest 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 4,282 reported delay minutes.

Late-arriving aircraft
42%
Carrier
37%
National Airspace System
15%
Extreme weather
7%

42% 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 4,282 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 6 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 4,282 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 37%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 1,575 of the 4,282 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations sit at 2.44% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.49%.

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. 9.5% 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 723 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 runs 73.9% on time across 204 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. 205 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 ORD to ALB

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 205 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 74.4% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 199 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

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.

Key figures