Carrier route record
NKORD→DFW
Spirit Airlines · Chicago to Dallas-Fort Worth
- Flights
- 124
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 2%
- Carriers
- 7
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.
Spirit on ORD to DFW draws a D−. Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is an hour and a half behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 124 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 2,010 at 73.2% on time.
United Airlines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 73.2% on time across 2,010 flights.
Key figures
On time
63.6%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 118 completed flights
Avg delay
82 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.23%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
69.7%
Every carrier on ORD to DFW, 6,955 flights
These figures cover 124 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 13.6% 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
Spirit against every carrier on ORD to DFW
Spirit flew 124 of the 6,955 flights on ORD to DFW, about 2% of it. Its 63.6% on time is 6 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 69.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of seven carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 87.5% to Spirit at 63.6%. Three of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The three carriers here are closely matched: 5 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 8 | 87.5% | 22 min | 0.00% | A+ |
| Republic Airwaysthin sample | 12 | 75.0% | 65 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| United Airlines | 2,010 | 73.2% | 72 min | 1.29% | C |
| Envoy Airthin sample | 134 | 71.9% | 71 min | 3.73% | C− |
| American Airlines | 4,233 | 68.3% | 94 min | 3.87% | C− |
| Frontier Airlines | 434 | 68.0% | 85 min | 3.69% | C− |
| Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample | 124 | 63.6% | 82 min | 3.23% | D− |
American Airlines cancels 3.9% 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 Spirit runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 38 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am8 flights—
- 8am–11am—
- 11am–2pm34 flights87.9%
- 2pm–5pm24 flights—
- 5pm–8pm10 flights—
- 8pm–5am48 flights50.0%
Scale runs 40% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 50.0% on time, against 87.9% for the 11am–2pm 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 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 48 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Spirit on ORD to DFW through the year
- Jul–Sep 202528 flights—
- Oct–Dec 202573 flights63.8%
- Jan–Mar 20266 flights—
- Apr–Jun 202617 flights—
Scale runs 55% 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 63.6% on time across 124 flights.
Split by quarter, Spirit on ORD to DFW logged 28 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 73 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 6 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 17 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 63.6% annual figure is the one to use.
Delay causes
Why Spirit runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. National Airspace System accounts for 58% of the 3,540 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.
- 58%National Airspace System
- 21%Carrier
- 16%Late-arriving aircraft
- 5%Extreme weather
58% 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 2,063 minutes out of 3,540, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 3,540 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations run at 3.23%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in 30 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. 13.6% 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 802 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 66.9% on time across 129 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. 124 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 Spirit on ORD to DFW
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.23% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 11am–2pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 118 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to DFW, every carrier
- Spirit on DFW to ORD, the return leg
- United Airlines on ORD to DFW73.2%
- Envoy Air on ORD to DFW71.9%
- American Airlines on ORD to DFW68.3%
- Frontier Airlines on ORD to DFW68.0%
- Spirit Airlines network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW) 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, July 2025 to June 2026. Last updated 15 September 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.