Carrier route record
OOORD→BNA
SkyWest Airlines · Chicago to Nashville
- Flights
- 1,467
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 29%
- Carriers
- 9
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on ORD to BNA carries a cancellation problem, not just a delay problem: 3.9% of scheduled flights never operate, against 1.8% nationally. Of the ones that do fly, a little over half of flights arrive on time, worth a D− overall. The punctuality figure counts only flights that actually departed, so it flatters an operation that cancels this often. That rests on 1,467 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Republic Airways, flew 560 at 76.6% on time.
Republic Airways is the most reliable of the four carriers covered here at 76.6% on time across 560 flights.
Key figures
On time
61.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,406 completed flights
Avg delay
89 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.89%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
68.6%
Every carrier on ORD to BNA, 5,021 flights
These figures cover 1,467 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 19.4% 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 BNA
SkyWest flew 1,467 of the 5,021 flights on ORD to BNA, about 29% of it. Its 61.0% on time is 8 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 68.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of nine carriers on the route, where the range runs from PSA at 100.0% to SkyWest at 61.0%. Four 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 76.6% of the time; American Airlines manages 63.8%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 382 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA Airlinesthin sample | 3 | 100.0% | — | 0.00% | A+ |
| Republic Airways | 560 | 76.6% | 56 min | 1.43% | B |
| Envoy Air | 783 | 74.8% | 60 min | 3.19% | C− |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 81 | 71.8% | 71 min | 3.70% | C− |
| Southwest Airlinesthin sample | 338 | 70.7% | 60 min | 1.18% | C |
| United Airlines | 1,381 | 70.4% | 74 min | 1.67% | C |
| Spirit Airlinesthin sample | 26 | 69.2% | 32 min | 0.00% | C+ |
| American Airlines | 382 | 63.8% | 116 min | 1.83% | D |
| SkyWest Airlines (this page) | 1,467 | 61.0% | 89 min | 3.89% | D− |
Envoy Air cancels 3.2% 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 31 points, against 13 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am247 flights77.5%
- 8am–11am67 flights69.7%
- 11am–2pm235 flights57.8%
- 2pm–5pm178 flights61.7%
- 5pm–8pm230 flights46.3%
- 8pm–5am510 flights59.4%
Scale runs 40% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 46.3% on time, against 77.5% 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 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 510 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
SkyWest on ORD to BNA through the year
December is the weak month at 42.6% on time, against 80.5% in May. 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. March was the busiest month here, with 173 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 66.5% on time and Sunday the weakest at 54.4%. 12 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 49,000 reported delay minutes.
- 38%Carrier
- 23%Late-arriving aircraft
- 20%Extreme weather
- 19%National Airspace System
Extreme weather accounts for 20% 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 3.2 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 48,788 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 38%, 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 18,000 of the 49,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations run at 3.89%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about 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. 19.4% 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.
At 409 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 is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 65.9% on time across 1,467 flights, 5 points above 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.
The sample behind these figures is 1,467 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.
What to do with this
Booking SkyWest on ORD to BNA
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.89% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; 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. 1,406 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to BNA, every carrier
- SkyWest on BNA to ORD, the return leg
- Republic Airways on ORD to BNA76.6%
- Envoy Air on ORD to BNA74.8%
- Southwest Airlines on ORD to BNA70.7%
- United Airlines on ORD to BNA70.4%
- American Airlines on ORD to BNA63.8%
- SkyWest Airlines network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Nashville International (BNA) 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.