Carrier route record

AAORD→OMA

American Airlines · Chicago to Omaha

Flights: 242
Period: September 2025 to August 2026
Share of route: 8%
Carriers: 6

Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 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 53.4% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 24 points worse than the national rate of 77.3%. Late arrivals average a little over an hour. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 242 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Envoy Air, flew 825 at 75.7% on time.

Envoy Air is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 75.7% on time across 825 flights.

On time

53.4%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 238 completed flights

Avg delay

76 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.65%

National rate is 1.89%

Whole route

69.3%

Every carrier on ORD to OMA, 3,105 flights

These figures cover 242 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 16.4% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.

Fare search by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.

Carrier by carrier

American against every carrier on ORD to OMA

American flew 242 of the 3,105 flights on ORD to OMA, about 8% of it. Its 53.4% on time is 16 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 75.7% to American at 53.4%. 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 75.7% of the time; SkyWest Airlines manages 63.7%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 452 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on ORD to OMA
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Envoy Air	825	75.7%	56 min	3.52%	B−
Republic Airwaysthin sample	199	72.9%	63 min	3.52%	C−
United Airlines	1,379	69.6%	66 min	1.52%	C
SkyWest Airlines	452	63.7%	75 min	3.10%	D−
PSA Airlinesthin sample	8	57.1%	60 min	12.50%	D−
American Airlines (this page)thin sample	242	53.4%	76 min	1.65%	F

Envoy Air cancels 3.5% 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.

Timetable by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.

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 12 points, against 12 points between the best and worst carrier.

5am–8am—
8am–11am4 flights—
11am–2pm—
2pm–5pm6 flights—
5pm–8pm52 flights61.5%
8pm–5am180 flights49.4%

Scale runs 40% to 65%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 49.4% on time, against 61.5% 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 180 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

American on ORD to OMA through the year

Jul–Sep 202542 flights47.6%
Oct–Dec 202597 flights62.9%
Apr–Jun 202645 flights38.6%
Jul–Sep 202658 flights52.7%

Scale runs 30% to 70%.

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 53.4% on time across 242 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 61 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 69.7% on time and Sunday the weakest at 30.8%, a spread of 39 points.

Arrival by arrival

How late American on ORD to OMA runs when it is late

The 111 late arrivals split 33 under half an hour, 39 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 39 an hour or more.

15+ min early26 flights10.9%
Within 15 min101 flights42.4%
15–29 min late33 flights13.9%
30–59 min late39 flights16.4%
1–2 hours late16 flights6.7%
2+ hours late23 flights9.7%

Scale runs 0% to 100%.

Share of 238 completed flights by arrival against schedule.

Time lost at the gate mostly stays lost. Of 104 departures that left 15 minutes late or more, only 10 made it up before arrival. In the other direction, 17 flights left on time yet arrived 15 minutes late or more, so that delay built up after pushback: in the air, in a holding pattern or on the ground at OMA.

The worst days

Worst days for American on ORD to OMA

The latest arrival of the period was on 13 July 2026, 7 hours 45 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. The same cause led on three of the five worst days.

The latest arrivals of American on ORD to OMA in the period
Date	Arrived late by	Largest filed cause
13 July 2026	7 hours 45 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
12 June 2026	6 hours 40 minutes	Carrier
11 July 2026	6 hours 8 minutes	Carrier
2 October 2025	5 hours 18 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
6 August 2026	3 hours 32 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft

Delay causes

Why American runs late on this route

Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 58% of the 8,381 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.

Late-arriving aircraft
58%
Carrier
30%
National Airspace System
10%
Extreme weather
3%

58% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 8,381 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 19 to one. The split is drawn from 8,381 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations sit at 1.65% against a national 1.89%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

16.4% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection 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 80.3% on time across 243 flights, 27 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 27 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 242 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. 242 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 53.4% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 238 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated 22 October 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.

Key figures