Route reliability record
ORD→CWA
Chicago to Mosinee
- Flights
- 1,016
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Distance
- 213 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route carries a cancellation problem, not just a delay problem: 4.1% of scheduled flights never operate, against 1.9% nationally. Of the ones that do fly, close to three flights in four arrive on time, worth a B− overall. The punctuality figure counts only flights that actually departed, so it flatters an operation that cancels this often. That rests on 1,016 ORD to CWA flights, with a median arrival 6 minutes early.
Best time to fly ORD to CWA: a 8am–11am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 80.6% of the time and Tuesday flights 78.7%, against 75.6% for the route overall.
The US average over the same twelve months is 77.3%, so there is little to separate this route from the country as a whole. The variation that matters here is internal: which carrier, and what time of day.
Key figures
On time
75.6%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 971 completed flights
Avg delay
64 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
4.13%
National rate is 1.89%
Best carrier
Envoy
75.6% on time across 1,013 flights
These figures cover 1,016 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 8.7% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on ORD to CWA
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 Air | 1,013 | 75.6% | 63 min | 4.15% | B− |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 3 | 66.7% | 144 min | 0.00% | C+ |
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Departure window
The best time of day to leave
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 1,016 flights.
- 5am–8am3 flights—
- 8am–11am262 flights80.6%
- 11am–2pm95 flights76.6%
- 2pm–5pm267 flights74.9%
- 5pm–8pm64 flights72.1%
- 8pm–5am325 flights72.3%
Scale runs 65% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 80.6% of the time, against 72.1% for the evening window. That is 9 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 325 flights scheduled in it.
Explore
Filter ORD to CWA by airline, time, month and day
Pick a breakdown and a carrier. The dashed mark on each row is the same slice for every US flight.
On ORD to CWA, the best departure window is 8am–11am at 80.6% on time and the worst is 5pm–8pm at 72.1%, a real gap of 8.5 points. All US flights leaving 8am–11am ran 83.9%.
- 5–8am—
- 8–11am80.6%
- 11am–2pm76.6%
- 2–5pm74.9%
- 5–8pm72.1%
- 8pm–5am72.3%
best all US flightsScale 60% to 95%. Cells under 30 flights show a dash.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 35 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
December is the weak month at 51.9% on time, against 87.0% 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. July was the busiest month here, with 94 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 78.7% on time and Thursday the weakest at 70.5%, a spread of 8 points.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 46% of the 15,000 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 46%Late-arriving aircraft
- 21%National Airspace System
- 20%Carrier
- 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 15,048 reported delay minutes.
46% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 15,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 3 to one.
Cancellations run at 4.13%, against 1.89% 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 actually costs
8.7% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.3%, so a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last about an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 213 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 79.7% on time across 1,016 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 1,016 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in CWA after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.13% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you about an hour; 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. 971 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
ORD to CWA questions
How often is ORD to CWA delayed?
About one flight in four arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 24.4% of the 1,016 flights in this analysis, against 22.7% nationally. Delayed flights are late by about an hour on average.
How reliable is ORD to CWA compared with the rest of the country?
75.6% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.3%, a difference of 2 points against it. That is worth a B− on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on ORD to CWA?
The 8am–11am departure window is the strongest at 80.6% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 72.1%, 9 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are December delays on ORD to CWA?
December is the weakest month at 51.9% on time, compared with 87.0% in May. Across the year that is 35 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- CWA to ORD — the return legseparate record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- ORD to LGA, a related route66.6%
- ORD to BOS, a related route66.6%
- ORD to LAX, a related route72.0%
- Envoy Air on-time record75.6%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record66.7%
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
Direction matters. ORD to CWA and CWA to ORD are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.