Route reliability record
ORD→GEG
Chicago to Spokane
- Flights
- 744
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 1,498 mi
- Carriers
- 3
This route draws a D. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 744 ORD to GEG flights, with a median arrival 4 minutes late.
Best time to fly ORD to GEG: a 11am–2pm departure, ideally on a Saturday. Flights in that window arrived on time 81.2% of the time and Saturday flights 69.7%, against 64.7% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so this route runs 13 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 129 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
64.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 731 completed flights
Avg delay
71 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.21%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
65.4% on time across 390 flights
These figures cover 744 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 13.3% 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
Which airline is most reliable on ORD to GEG
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlinesthin sample | 2 | 100.0% | — | 0.00% | A+ |
| SkyWest Airlines | 390 | 65.4% | 64 min | 1.79% | C |
| American Airlinesthin sample | 352 | 63.7% | 78 min | 0.57% | D+ |
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 36 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am500 flights67.3%
- 11am–2pm48 flights81.2%
- 2pm–5pm62 flights45.0%
- 5pm–8pm104 flights58.0%
- 8pm–5am30 flights—
Scale runs 35% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The best window here is not the first bank but the 11am–2pm slot at 81.2% on time, ahead of 2pm–5pm at 45.0%. Where the curve peaks mid-day rather than at dawn, the constraint is usually congestion at one end rather than the aircraft's own rotation. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 500 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 50 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.
Delays peak in March, when the on-time rate falls to 29.6%. June is the strongest month at 80.0%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 50 points. July was the busiest month here, with 92 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 69.7% on time and Sunday the weakest at 57.9%. 12 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
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 18,000 reported delay minutes.
- 37%Late-arriving aircraft
- 34%Carrier
- 18%National Airspace System
- 10%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
37% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. That is a cascade, and cascades start small and grow through the day. Across 18,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 4 to one. It is the strongest argument for booking the first departure of the morning, when the aircraft has been sitting at the gate overnight with nothing to inherit. The split is drawn from 18,310 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 34%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 6,315 of the 18,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations sit at 1.21% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.54%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 13.3% 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 1,498 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 64.2% on time across 744 flights, within half a point 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. 744 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 GEG after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 744 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 64.7% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 731 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
ORD to GEG questions
How often is ORD to GEG delayed?
About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 35.3% of the 744 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
How reliable is ORD to GEG compared with the rest of the country?
64.7% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 13 points against it. That is worth a D on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on ORD to GEG?
The 11am–2pm departure window is the strongest at 81.2% on time. The 2pm–5pm window is the weakest at 45.0%, 36 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 March delays on ORD to GEG?
March is the weakest month at 29.6% on time, compared with 80.0% in June. Across the year that is 50 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
- GEG to ORD — the return legseparate record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- SkyWest Airlines on ORD to GEG65.4%
- American Airlines on ORD to GEG63.7%
- ORD to LGA, a related route67.3%
- SEA to GEG, a related route82.5%
- ORD to BOS, a related route67.6%
- United Airlines on-time record100.0%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record65.4%
- American Airlines on-time record63.7%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
Direction matters. ORD to GEG and GEG 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, July 2025 to June 2026. Last updated 15 September 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.