Carrier route record
YXORD→CHA
Republic Airways · Chicago to Chattanooga
- Flights
- 239
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 25%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Republic Airways.
Republic on ORD to CHA draws a C−. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is an hour and a half behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 239 flights, with a median arrival 6 minutes early.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Republic on ORD to CHA runs 11 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 109 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
66.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 228 completed flights
Avg delay
83 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
4.60%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
70.2%
Every carrier on ORD to CHA, 954 flights
These figures cover 239 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
Republic against every carrier on ORD to CHA
Republic flew 239 of the 954 flights on ORD to CHA, about 25% of it. Its 66.7% on time is 4 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 70.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 77.3% to Republic at 66.7%. One 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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Airthin sample | 205 | 77.3% | 78 min | 3.41% | B− |
| SkyWest Airlines | 510 | 69.0% | 78 min | 5.29% | C− |
| Republic Airways (this page)thin sample | 239 | 66.7% | 83 min | 4.60% | C− |
Departure window
When Republic 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 239 flights.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am1 flights—
- 11am–2pm27 flights—
- 2pm–5pm98 flights64.2%
- 5pm–8pm69 flights63.6%
- 8pm–5am44 flights71.8%
Scale runs 55% to 75%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 63.6% on time, against 71.8% for the 8pm–5am 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 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 98 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Republic on ORD to CHA through the year
- Oct–Dec 2025147 flights63.6%
- Jan–Mar 202676 flights70.8%
- Apr–Jun 202616 flights—
Scale runs 55% to 75%. 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 66.7% on time across 239 flights.
Split by quarter, Republic on ORD to CHA logged 147 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 76 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 16 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 66.7% annual figure is the one to use.
Across the week, Friday is the strongest day at 83.9% on time and Sunday the weakest at 37.1%. 47 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 6,319 reported delay minutes.
- 36%Late-arriving aircraft
- 25%Carrier
- 22%Extreme weather
- 17%National Airspace System
Extreme weather accounts for 22% 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 3.5 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 6,319 reported delay minutes.
36% 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 6,319 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 2 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.
Cancellations run at 4.60%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly one flight in twenty 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. 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 501 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 66.8% on time across 238 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. 239 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 ORD to CHA
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.60% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 8pm–5am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 228 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to CHA, every carrier
- Republic on CHA to ORD, the return leg
- Envoy Air on ORD to CHA77.3%
- SkyWest Airlines on ORD to CHA69.0%
- Republic Airways network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
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.