Carrier route record
OOORD→MSP
SkyWest Airlines · Chicago to Minneapolis
- Flights
- 702
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 11%
- Carriers
- 8
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on ORD to MSP draws a C−. About 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 702 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Envoy Air, flew 1,084 at 74.2% on time.
Envoy Air is the most reliable of the four carriers covered here at 74.2% on time across 1,084 flights.
Key figures
On time
67.1%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 678 completed flights
Avg delay
99 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.42%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
69.7%
Every carrier on ORD to MSP, 6,324 flights
These figures cover 702 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 14.9% 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
SkyWest against every carrier on ORD to MSP
SkyWest flew 702 of the 6,324 flights on ORD to MSP, about 11% of it. Its 67.1% on time is 3 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 69.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number six of eight carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 74.2% to Frontier at 50.0%. Three of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The four 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Air | 1,084 | 74.2% | 66 min | 2.77% | C |
| Republic Airways | 533 | 72.0% | 75 min | 6.19% | C− |
| United Airlines | 2,401 | 69.5% | 70 min | 1.04% | C |
| Delta Air Lines | 1,411 | 69.0% | 96 min | 1.98% | C |
| PSA Airlinesthin sample | 43 | 68.3% | 81 min | 4.65% | C− |
| SkyWest Airlines (this page) | 702 | 67.1% | 99 min | 3.42% | C− |
| American Airlinesthin sample | 137 | 51.1% | 118 min | 0.73% | F+ |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 13 | 50.0% | 52 min | 7.69% | F− |
Republic Airways cancels 6.2% 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 SkyWest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 44 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am173 flights82.4%
- 8am–11am101 flights70.0%
- 11am–2pm183 flights63.5%
- 2pm–5pm159 flights59.6%
- 5pm–8pm44 flights38.1%
- 8pm–5am42 flights71.8%
Scale runs 30% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 38.1% on time, against 82.4% for the 5am–8am 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 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 183 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
SkyWest on ORD to MSP through the year
December is the weak month at 43.2% on time, against 79.0% 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. March was the busiest month here, with 122 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 72.8% on time and Friday the weakest at 58.6%. 14 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why SkyWest runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 50% of the 22,000 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.
- 50%Carrier
- 26%Extreme weather
- 21%National Airspace System
- 3%Late-arriving aircraft
Extreme weather accounts for 26% 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 4.2 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 22,037 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 50%, 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 11,000 of the 22,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations run at 3.42%, 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. 14.9% 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 334 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 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg runs 67.6% on time across 704 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. 702 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 SkyWest on ORD to MSP
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.42% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; 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. 678 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to MSP, every carrier
- SkyWest on MSP to ORD, the return leg
- Envoy Air on ORD to MSP74.2%
- Republic Airways on ORD to MSP72.0%
- United Airlines on ORD to MSP69.5%
- Delta Air Lines on ORD to MSP69.0%
- American Airlines on ORD to MSP51.1%
- SkyWest Airlines network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Minneapolis-St Paul International (MSP) 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.