Route reliability record
ORD→LNK
Chicago to Lincoln
- Flights
- 1,555
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 466 mi
- Carriers
- 1
This route 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 1,555 ORD to LNK flights, with a median arrival 2 minutes late.
Best time to fly ORD to LNK: a 8am–11am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 74.7% of the time and Tuesday flights 72.0%, against 62.9% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so this route runs 15 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 147 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
62.9%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,500 completed flights
Avg delay
91 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.02%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
SkyWest
62.9% on time across 1,555 flights
These figures cover 1,555 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 16.6% 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
Which airline is most reliable on ORD to LNK
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines | 1,555 | 62.9% | 91 min | 3.02% | D− |
Flight by flight
Flights on ORD to LNK
The flight numbers below flew this route at least 250 times in the period, busiest first. Each has its own record, with its schedule and delay causes.
Best ways to make this trip
The most reliable ways to fly Chicago to Lincoln
Every airline on this route and on the routes between nearby airports, ranked by how often a scheduled flight actually operated and arrived on time. 4 of the top 5 use a different airport at one end.
| Option | Airline | Success | On time | Cancelled | Best departure | Most punctual flight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. MDW → OMAChicago to Omaha | Southwest Airlines | 74.8% | 75.7% | 1.18% | 8am–11am, Wed | — |
| 2. ORD → OMAChicago to Omaha | Envoy Air | 73.3% | 75.8% | 3.27% | 11am–2pm, Tue | — |
| 3. ORD → OMAChicago to Omaha | United Airlines | 69.8% | 70.6% | 1.19% | 8am–11am, Tue | UA 1778 08:45 |
| 4. ORD → OMAChicago to Omaha | SkyWest Airlines | 61.4% | 63.2% | 2.89% | 8am–11am, Fri | — |
| 5. ORD → LNKChicago to Lincoln | SkyWest Airlines | 61.0% | 62.9% | 3.02% | 8am–11am, Tue | OO 5215 08:45 |
Success is the share of scheduled flights that operated and arrived less than 15 minutes late, so a cancelled flight counts against it. “(route)” means the best time comes from every carrier on the route rather than this airline alone.
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 24 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–11am398 flights74.7%
- 11am–2pm357 flights65.5%
- 2pm–5pm391 flights55.6%
- 5pm–8pm231 flights50.9%
- 8pm–5am178 flights62.5%
Scale runs 40% to 80%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 50.9% on time, against 74.7% for the 8am–11am 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 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 398 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 42 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.
December is the weak month at 41.9% on time, against 84.2% in September. 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. May was the busiest month here, with 152 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 72.0% on time and Friday the weakest at 59.1%. 13 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 51,000 reported delay minutes.
- 39%Late-arriving aircraft
- 29%Carrier
- 21%National Airspace System
- 11%Extreme weather
Extreme weather accounts for 11% 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 1.8 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 50,673 reported delay minutes.
39% 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 51,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 3 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.
Cancellations run at 3.02%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly 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 actually costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 16.6% 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.
At 466 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 8am–11am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 75.5% on time across 1,553 flights, 13 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 13 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,555 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in LNK after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.02% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 8am–11am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 1,500 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
ORD to LNK questions
How often is ORD to LNK delayed?
Roughly 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 37.1% of the 1,555 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by an hour and a half on average.
How reliable is ORD to LNK compared with the rest of the country?
62.9% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 15 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 LNK?
The 8am–11am departure window is the strongest at 74.7% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 50.9%, 24 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 December delays on ORD to LNK?
December is the weakest month at 41.9% on time, compared with 84.2% in September. Across the year that is 42 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
- LNK to ORD — the return legseparate record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- ORD to LGA, a related route67.3%
- DEN to LNK, a related route76.3%
- ORD to BOS, a related route67.6%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record62.9%
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
Direction matters. ORD to LNK and LNK 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.