Carrier route record
OOORD→CLT
SkyWest Airlines · Chicago to Charlotte
- Flights
- 160
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 4%
- Carriers
- 6
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on ORD to CLT earns an F−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 53.6% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 24 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average roughly 50 minutes. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 160 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Republic Airways, flew 377 at 79.7% on time.
Republic Airways is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 79.7% on time across 377 flights.
Key figures
On time
53.6%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 153 completed flights
Avg delay
52 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
4.38%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
73.5%
Every carrier on ORD to CLT, 4,306 flights
These figures cover 160 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 12.4% 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 CLT
SkyWest flew 160 of the 4,306 flights on ORD to CLT, about 4% of it. Its 53.6% on time is 20 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 73.5%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of six carriers on the route, where the range runs from Spirit at 100.0% to SkyWest at 53.6%. Two 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 79.7% of the time; United Airlines manages 70.6%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 612 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spirit Airlinesthin sample | 1 | 100.0% | — | 0.00% | A+ |
| Republic Airways | 377 | 79.7% | 78 min | 2.12% | B |
| American Airlines | 2,999 | 74.6% | 85 min | 2.43% | C |
| United Airlines | 612 | 70.6% | 76 min | 0.98% | C+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 157 | 67.1% | 121 min | 3.18% | C− |
| SkyWest Airlines (this page)thin sample | 160 | 53.6% | 52 min | 4.38% | F− |
Republic leads United by 9 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh 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 45 points, against 9 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am6 flights—
- 8am–11am6 flights—
- 11am–2pm—
- 2pm–5pm39 flights83.8%
- 5pm–8pm109 flights39.0%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 30% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 39.0% on time, against 83.8% for the 2pm–5pm 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 109 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
SkyWest on ORD to CLT through the year
- Jan–Mar 202675 flights36.1%
- Apr–Jun 202685 flights69.1%
Scale runs 30% 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 53.6% on time across 160 flights.
Split by quarter, SkyWest on ORD to CLT logged 75 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 85 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 53.6% annual figure is the one to use.
Delay causes
Why SkyWest runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 42% of the 3,660 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.
- 42%Carrier
- 26%National Airspace System
- 18%Late-arriving aircraft
- 14%Extreme weather
Extreme weather accounts for 14% 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 2.3 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 3,660 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 42%, 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 1,543 of the 3,660 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations run at 4.38%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly 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. 12.4% 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 599 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 81.6% on time across 160 flights, 28 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 28 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 160 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 CLT
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.38% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you roughly 50 minutes; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 2pm–5pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 153 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to CLT, every carrier
- SkyWest on CLT to ORD, the return leg
- Republic Airways on ORD to CLT79.7%
- American Airlines on ORD to CLT74.6%
- United Airlines on ORD to CLT70.6%
- Frontier Airlines on ORD to CLT67.1%
- SkyWest Airlines network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Charlotte Douglas International (CLT) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.