Skip to content
DelayAtlas

Carrier route record

AAORDCID

American Airlines · Chicago to Cedar Rapids

Flights
127
Period
July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route
5%
Carriers
5
D−GRADE

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

American on ORD to CID 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 127 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Envoy Air, flew 964 at 72.2% on time.

Envoy Air is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 72.2% on time across 964 flights.

Key figures

On time

60.3%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 121 completed flights

Avg delay

75 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

4.72%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

67.8%

Every carrier on ORD to CID, 2,715 flights

These figures cover 127 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 16.5% 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

American against every carrier on ORD to CID

American flew 127 of the 2,715 flights on ORD to CID, about 5% of it. Its 60.3% on time is 8 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 67.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 72.4% to American at 60.3%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Envoy Air arrives on time 72.2% of the time; United Airlines manages 63.4%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 456 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on ORD to CID
AirlineFlightsOn timeAvg delayCancelledGrade
Republic Airwaysthin sample35472.4%68 min4.80%C−
Envoy Air96472.2%68 min2.49%C
SkyWest Airlines81364.0%104 min5.17%D−
United Airlines45663.4%95 min1.54%D
American Airlines (this page)thin sample12760.3%75 min4.72%D−

SkyWest Airlines cancels 5.2% 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 American 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 127 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split American's ORD to CID record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 60.3% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

American on ORD to CID through the year

  • Oct–Dec 20252 flights
  • Jan–Mar 202636 flights63.6%
  • Apr–Jun 202689 flights59.3%

Scale runs 50% to 70%. 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 60.3% on time across 127 flights.

Split by quarter, American on ORD to CID logged 2 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 36 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 89 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 60.3% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why American runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 59% of the 3,619 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.

  • Late-arriving aircraft
    59%
  • Extreme weather
    17%
  • Carrier
    16%
  • National Airspace System
    9%

Extreme weather accounts for 17% 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 2.7 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 3,619 reported delay minutes.

59% 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 3,619 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 4 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 4.72%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about 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. 16.5% 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.

At 196 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 8pm–5am window matters as much as it does.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 86.7% on time across 126 flights, 26 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 26 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 127 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 American on ORD to CID

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.72% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; 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. 121 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Related

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.