Carrier route record

AAORD→CLE

American Airlines · Chicago to Cleveland

Flights: 422
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 9%
Carriers: 5

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

American on ORD to CLE earns a D−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 56.4% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 21 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average close to two hours. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 422 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Republic Airways, flew 540 at 74.5% on time.

Republic Airways is the most reliable of the four carriers covered here at 74.5% on time across 540 flights.

On time

56.4%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 401 completed flights

Avg delay

100 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

4.98%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

70.1%

Every carrier on ORD to CLE, 4,899 flights

These figures cover 422 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 20.7% 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 CLE

American flew 422 of the 4,899 flights on ORD to CLE, about 9% of it. Its 56.4% on time is 14 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 70.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 74.5% to American at 56.4%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Republic Airways arrives on time 74.5% of the time; SkyWest Airlines manages 66.2%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 948 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on ORD to CLE
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Republic Airways	540	74.5%	70 min	5.56%	C−
Envoy Air	814	72.7%	60 min	4.18%	C−
United Airlines	2,175	72.3%	72 min	1.29%	C
SkyWest Airlines	948	66.2%	86 min	3.48%	C−
American Airlines (this page)	422	56.4%	100 min	4.98%	D−

Republic Airways cancels 5.6% 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 matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 41 points, against 8 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am—
8am–11am44 flights80.5%
11am–2pm19 flights—
2pm–5pm116 flights63.7%
5pm–8pm134 flights53.8%
8pm–5am109 flights39.4%

Scale runs 30% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 39.4% on time, against 80.5% for the 8am–11am 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 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 134 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

American on ORD to CLE through the year

Jul–Sep 2025106 flights41.7%
Oct–Dec 202560 flights59.3%
Jan–Mar 202658 flights72.7%
Apr–Jun 2026198 flights58.1%

Scale runs 35% 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 56.4% on time across 422 flights.

American on ORD to CLE did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jan–Mar 2026 at 72.7% on time and its weakest Jul–Sep 2025 at 41.7%, a swing of 31 points on roughly 106 flights a quarter. The twelve-month rate averages over that, so if you are flying in a weak quarter the quarter's own figure is the better guide.

Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 64.7% on time and Sunday the weakest at 44.6%. 20 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why American runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 64% of the 18,000 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
64%
Carrier
27%
National Airspace System
8%
Extreme weather
1%

64% 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 18,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 53 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 17,576 reported delay minutes.

The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 80.5% on time here.

Cancellations run at 4.98%, 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. 20.7% 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 316 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 8am–11am window matters as much as it does.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 74.1% on time across 420 flights, 18 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 18 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 422 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 CLE

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.98% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you close to two hours; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 8am–11am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 401 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