Carrier route record

OOORD→BHM

SkyWest Airlines · Chicago to Birmingham

Flights: 107
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 BHM draws a D. Roughly 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 107 flights, with a median arrival 7 minutes late.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so SkyWest on ORD to BHM runs 16 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 157 extra late arrivals.

On time

61.9%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 105 completed flights

Avg delay

70 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.87%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

78.5%

Every carrier on ORD to BHM, 1,137 flights

These figures cover 107 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 11.4% 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 BHM

SkyWest flew 107 of the 1,137 flights on ORD to BHM, about 9% of it. Its 61.9% on time is 17 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 78.5%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from PSA at 100.0% to SkyWest at 61.9%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

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.

On-time performance by carrier on ORD to BHM
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
PSA Airlinesthin sample	2	100.0%	—	0.00%	A+
Republic Airwaysthin sample	255	82.8%	59 min	1.96%	B
Envoy Air	773	79.3%	64 min	1.68%	B
SkyWest Airlines (this page)thin sample	107	61.9%	70 min	1.87%	D

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 107 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split SkyWest's ORD to BHM record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 61.9% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

SkyWest on ORD to BHM through the year

Jul–Sep 20255 flights—
Oct–Dec 202527 flights—
Jan–Mar 202611 flights—
Apr–Jun 202664 flights72.6%

Scale runs 65% 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 61.9% on time across 107 flights.

Split by quarter, SkyWest on ORD to BHM logged 5 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 27 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 11 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 64 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 61.9% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why SkyWest runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Extreme weather accounts for 44% of the 2,789 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.

Extreme weather
44%
Carrier
24%
Late-arriving aircraft
20%
National Airspace System
12%

Extreme weather accounts for 44% 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 7.0 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 2,789 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations sit at 1.87% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.

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. 11.4% 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 584 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 55.2% on time across 108 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. 107 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 BHM

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 107 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 61.9% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 105 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