Carrier route record
AAORD→OMA
American Airlines · Chicago to Omaha
- Flights
- 260
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 9%
- Carriers
- 6
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with American Airlines.
American on ORD to OMA earns an F, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 50.0% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 28 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average about an hour. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 260 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Envoy Air, flew 855 at 75.8% on time.
Envoy Air is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 75.8% on time across 855 flights.
Key figures
On time
50.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 252 completed flights
Avg delay
63 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.92%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
69.3%
Every carrier on ORD to OMA, 3,022 flights
These figures cover 260 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 16.7% 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
American against every carrier on ORD to OMA
American flew 260 of the 3,022 flights on ORD to OMA, about 9% of it. Its 50.0% on time is 19 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 69.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of six carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 75.8% to American at 50.0%. Two 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 75.8% of the time; SkyWest Airlines manages 63.2%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 381 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Air | 855 | 75.8% | 55 min | 3.27% | B− |
| United Airlines | 1,348 | 70.6% | 65 min | 1.19% | C |
| Republic Airwaysthin sample | 170 | 70.1% | 66 min | 3.53% | C− |
| SkyWest Airlines | 381 | 63.2% | 83 min | 2.89% | D |
| PSA Airlinesthin sample | 8 | 57.1% | 60 min | 12.50% | D− |
| American Airlines (this page)thin sample | 260 | 50.0% | 63 min | 1.92% | F |
Envoy Air cancels 3.3% 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 American runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 19 points, against 13 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am4 flights—
- 11am–2pm—
- 2pm–5pm10 flights—
- 5pm–8pm78 flights61.0%
- 8pm–5am168 flights41.6%
Scale runs 35% to 65%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 41.6% on time, against 61.0% for the 5pm–8pm 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 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 168 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
American on ORD to OMA through the year
- Jul–Sep 2025118 flights43.2%
- Oct–Dec 202597 flights62.9%
- Apr–Jun 202645 flights38.6%
Scale runs 30% to 70%. 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 50.0% on time across 260 flights.
American on ORD to OMA did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Oct–Dec 2025 at 62.9% on time and its weakest Apr–Jun 2026 at 38.6%, a swing of 24 points on roughly 87 flights a quarter. The twelve-month rate averages over that, so if you are flying in a weak quarter the quarter's own figure is the better guide.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 65.6% on time and Sunday the weakest at 28.6%. 37 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why American runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 53% of the 7,944 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.
- 53%Late-arriving aircraft
- 30%Carrier
- 12%National Airspace System
- 5%Extreme weather
53% 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 7,944 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 12 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 7,944 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations sit at 1.92% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 1.15%.
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. 16.7% 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 416 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 5pm–8pm window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 76.0% on time across 261 flights, 26 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 26 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 260 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 American on ORD to OMA
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 260 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 50.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 252 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to OMA, every carrier
- American on OMA to ORD, the return leg
- Envoy Air on ORD to OMA75.8%
- United Airlines on ORD to OMA70.6%
- Republic Airways on ORD to OMA70.1%
- SkyWest Airlines on ORD to OMA63.2%
- American Airlines network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- 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.