Carrier route record
MQORD→DEN
Envoy Air · Chicago to Denver
- Flights
- 125
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 2%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Envoy Air.
Envoy on ORD to DEN lands a B+, 2 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in four arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by roughly 50 minutes on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 125 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 3,758 at 77.4% on time.
United Airlines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 77.4% on time across 3,758 flights.
Key figures
On time
76.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 125 completed flights
Avg delay
52 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.00%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
74.2%
Every carrier on ORD to DEN, 6,169 flights
These figures cover 125 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 11 minutes early, which is the part an average hides: most flights here are fine, and the on-time rate is decided by a tail of badly late ones. On-time means under 15 minutes late, the DOT's own threshold.
Carrier by carrier
Envoy against every carrier on ORD to DEN
Envoy flew 125 of the 6,169 flights on ORD to DEN, about 2% of it. Its 76.0% on time is 2 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 74.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 77.4% to American at 66.5%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. United Airlines arrives on time 77.4% of the time; American Airlines manages 66.5%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,471 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlines | 3,758 | 77.4% | 73 min | 0.93% | B+ |
| Envoy Air (this page)thin sample | 125 | 76.0% | 52 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 483 | 73.0% | 68 min | 1.66% | C |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 332 | 72.5% | 139 min | 2.11% | C |
| American Airlines | 1,471 | 66.5% | 76 min | 1.77% | C |
United leads American by 11 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.
Departure window
When Envoy runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 22 points, against 11 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am54 flights88.9%
- 8am–11am15 flights—
- 11am–2pm12 flights—
- 2pm–5pm8 flights—
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am36 flights66.7%
Scale runs 60% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 88.9% of the time, against 66.7% for the overnight window. That is 22 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 54 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Envoy on ORD to DEN through the year
- Oct–Dec 20258 flights—
- Jan–Mar 2026108 flights75.9%
- Apr–Jun 20269 flights—
Scale runs 65% 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 76.0% on time across 125 flights.
Split by quarter, Envoy on ORD to DEN logged 8 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 108 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 9 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 76.0% annual figure is the one to use.
Delay causes
Why Envoy runs late on this route
Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 1,563 reported delay minutes.
- 31%Extreme weather
- 26%Late-arriving aircraft
- 23%National Airspace System
- 20%Carrier
Extreme weather accounts for 31% 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 4.9 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 1,563 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations are rare at 0.00%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Almost no flights are called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
6.4% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last roughly 50 minutes, which a normal layover absorbs.
The 888 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 runs 74.0% on time across 125 flights, within 2 points of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 125 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 Envoy on ORD to DEN
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 125 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 76.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 125 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to DEN, every carrier
- Envoy on DEN to ORD, the return leg
- United Airlines on ORD to DEN77.4%
- Southwest Airlines on ORD to DEN73.0%
- Frontier Airlines on ORD to DEN72.5%
- American Airlines on ORD to DEN66.5%
- Envoy Air network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
- 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.