Carrier route record
B6ORD→JFK
JetBlue Airways · Chicago to New York
- Flights
- 571
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 28%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with JetBlue Airways.
JetBlue on ORD to JFK lands a B−, 4 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. Roughly one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by close to two hours on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 571 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Republic Airways, flew 759 at 77.1% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, JetBlue's ORD to JFK record is 4 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 42 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
81.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 545 completed flights
Avg delay
103 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
4.38%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
73.4%
Every carrier on ORD to JFK, 2,012 flights
These figures cover 571 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 8.6% 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
JetBlue against every carrier on ORD to JFK
JetBlue flew 571 of the 2,012 flights on ORD to JFK, about 28% of it. Its 81.8% on time is 8 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 73.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 92.3% to Frontier at 59.8%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Republic Airways arrives on time 77.1% of the time; American Airlines manages 61.7%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 551 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delta Air Linesthin sample | 14 | 92.3% | 221 min | 7.14% | A− |
| JetBlue Airways (this page) | 571 | 81.8% | 103 min | 4.38% | B− |
| Republic Airways | 759 | 77.1% | 77 min | 2.11% | B |
| American Airlines | 551 | 61.7% | 99 min | 5.08% | D− |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 117 | 59.8% | 100 min | 4.27% | D− |
American Airlines cancels 5.1% 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 JetBlue 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 571 flights.
- 5am–8am259 flights85.7%
- 8am–11am120 flights84.6%
- 11am–2pm151 flights77.1%
- 2pm–5pm21 flights—
- 5pm–8pm20 flights—
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 70% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 77.1% on time against 85.7% for 5am–8am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 259 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
JetBlue on ORD to JFK through the year
December is the weak month at 64.5% on time, against 92.2% in May. Winter delays cluster: a single storm system can account for most of a month's shortfall, so an average December hides both very good weeks and genuinely unflyable days. June was the busiest month here, with 82 flights.
Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 85.5% on time and Sunday the weakest at 77.8%. 8 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why JetBlue 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 10,000 reported delay minutes.
- 36%National Airspace System
- 32%Late-arriving aircraft
- 31%Carrier
- 1%Extreme weather
36% 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 3,660 minutes out of 10,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 10,184 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 85.7% on time here.
Cancellations run at 4.38%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly one flight in 25 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
8.6% 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 close to two hours, which a normal layover absorbs.
The 740 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 67.7% on time across 572 flights, 14 points below 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 14 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 571 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 JetBlue on ORD to JFK
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.38% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you close to two hours; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 5am–8am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 545 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to JFK, every carrier
- JetBlue on JFK to ORD, the return leg
- Republic Airways on ORD to JFK77.1%
- American Airlines on ORD to JFK61.7%
- Frontier Airlines on ORD to JFK59.8%
- JetBlue Airways network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- John F. Kennedy International (JFK) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
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.