Carrier route record

NKORD→EWR

Spirit Airlines · Chicago to Newark

Flights: 150
Period: September 2025 to August 2026
Share of route: 2%
Carriers: 5

Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.

Spirit on ORD to EWR earns an F−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 45.6% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 32 points worse than the national rate of 77.3%. Late arrivals average a little over an hour. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 150 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Envoy Air, flew 533 at 78.0% on time.

Envoy Air is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 78.0% on time across 533 flights.

On time

45.6%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 125 completed flights

Avg delay

79 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

15.33%

National rate is 1.89%

Whole route

69.8%

Every carrier on ORD to EWR, 6,126 flights

These figures cover 150 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 34.4% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.

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Carrier by carrier

Spirit against every carrier on ORD to EWR

Spirit flew 150 of the 6,126 flights on ORD to EWR, about 2% of it. Its 45.6% on time is 24 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 69.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 78.0% to Spirit at 45.6%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Envoy Air arrives on time 78.0% of the time; American Airlines manages 59.0%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 926 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on ORD to EWR
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Envoy Air	533	78.0%	60 min	5.82%	B−
United Airlines	4,415	72.0%	89 min	2.85%	C
Republic Airwaysthin sample	102	60.2%	83 min	7.84%	D−
American Airlines	926	59.0%	87 min	4.97%	D−
Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample	150	45.6%	79 min	15.33%	F−

Envoy Air cancels 5.8% 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.

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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 23 points, against 19 points between the best and worst carrier.

5am–8am—
8am–11am21 flights—
11am–2pm10 flights—
2pm–5pm53 flights51.2%
5pm–8pm66 flights28.3%
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 20% to 55%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 28.3% on time, against 51.2% 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 66 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Spirit on ORD to EWR through the year

Oct–Dec 202546 flights56.4%
Jan–Mar 202680 flights41.5%
Apr–Jun 202624 flights—

Scale runs 35% to 60%. 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 45.6% on time across 150 flights.

Split by quarter, Spirit on ORD to EWR logged 46 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 80 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 24 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 45.6% annual figure is the one to use.

Arrival by arrival

How late Spirit on ORD to EWR runs when it is late

When Spirit on ORD to EWR is late it tends to be very late: 43 of its 68 late arrivals were an hour or more behind, and 13 were two hours or more.

15+ min early14 flights11.2%
Within 15 min43 flights34.4%
15–29 min late12 flights9.6%
30–59 min late13 flights10.4%
1–2 hours late30 flights24.0%
2+ hours late13 flights10.4%

Scale runs 0% to 100%.

Share of 125 completed flights by arrival against schedule.

12 of 73 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 16% of them. In the other direction, 7 flights left on time yet arrived 15 minutes late or more, so that delay built up after pushback: in the air, in a holding pattern or on the ground at EWR.

The worst days

Worst days for Spirit on ORD to EWR

The latest arrival of the period was on 18 January 2026, 4 hours 13 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as national airspace system delay. Three of the five worst days fell in February 2026.

The latest arrivals of Spirit on ORD to EWR in the period
Date	Arrived late by	Largest filed cause
18 January 2026	4 hours 13 minutes	National Airspace System
17 February 2026	3 hours 49 minutes	Carrier
14 February 2026	2 hours 57 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
30 November 2025	2 hours 36 minutes	National Airspace System
2 February 2026	2 hours 33 minutes	Carrier

Delay causes

Why Spirit runs late on this route

National Airspace System accounts for 44% of the 5,362 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.

National Airspace System
44%
Late-arriving aircraft
30%
Carrier
18%
Extreme weather
8%
Security
0%

44% 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 2,347 minutes out of 5,362, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 5,362 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations run at 15.33%, against 1.89% nationally. That is about one flight in seven 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

34.4% 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 719 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 51.6% on time across 149 flights, 6 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 6 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 150 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 EWR

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 15.33% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; 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. 125 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated 22 October 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.

Key figures