Carrier route record
OOORD→DCA
SkyWest Airlines · Chicago to Washington
- Flights
- 104
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 1%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on ORD to DCA earns a D−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 57.1% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 20 points worse than the national rate of 77.3%. Late arrivals average close to two hours. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 104 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 3,411 at 70.1% on time.
United Airlines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 70.1% on time across 3,411 flights.
Key figures
On time
57.1%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 98 completed flights
Avg delay
106 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
5.77%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
69.0%
Every carrier on ORD to DCA, 7,104 flights
These figures cover 104 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 29.6% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
SkyWest against every carrier on ORD to DCA
SkyWest flew 104 of the 7,104 flights on ORD to DCA, about 1% of it. Its 57.1% on time is 12 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 69.0%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 83.5% to SkyWest at 57.1%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The three carriers here are closely matched: 4 points separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Airthin sample | 171 | 83.5% | 47 min | 2.34% | B |
| United Airlines | 3,411 | 70.1% | 74 min | 2.14% | C |
| Republic Airways | 1,150 | 69.8% | 73 min | 4.43% | C− |
| American Airlines | 2,268 | 66.3% | 91 min | 3.62% | C− |
| SkyWest Airlines (this page)thin sample | 104 | 57.1% | 106 min | 5.77% | D− |
Republic Airways cancels 4.4% 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.
Timetable by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.
Departure window
When SkyWest 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 104 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split SkyWest's ORD to DCA record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 57.1% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
SkyWest on ORD to DCA through the year
- Oct–Dec 202545 flights64.3%
- Jan–Mar 20263 flights—
- Apr–Jun 202621 flights—
- Jul–Sep 202635 flights48.5%
Scale runs 40% 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 57.1% on time across 104 flights.
Split by quarter, SkyWest on ORD to DCA logged 45 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 3 flights in Jan–Mar 2026, 21 flights in Apr–Jun 2026 and 35 flights in Jul–Sep 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 57.1% annual figure is the one to use.
Delay causes
Why SkyWest runs late on this route
National Airspace System accounts for 50% of the 4,455 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 50%National Airspace System
- 22%Late-arriving aircraft
- 15%Extreme weather
- 14%Carrier
Extreme weather accounts for 15% 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 2.6 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 4,455 reported delay minutes.
50% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 2,206 minutes out of 4,455, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations run at 5.77%, against 1.89% nationally. That is roughly one flight in fifteen 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
29.6% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
The 612 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.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 60.4% on time across 104 flights, 3 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 3 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 104 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 DCA
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 5.77% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you close to two hours; 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. 98 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to DCA, every carrier
- SkyWest on DCA to ORD, the return leg
- Envoy Air on ORD to DCA83.5%
- United Airlines on ORD to DCA70.1%
- Republic Airways on ORD to DCA69.8%
- American Airlines on ORD to DCA66.3%
- SkyWest Airlines network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Ronald Reagan Washington National (DCA) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- What a cancellation rate actually tells you (and what it hides)
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.