Route reliability record
ORD→RIC
Chicago to Richmond
- Flights
- 2,219
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 642 mi
- Carriers
- 4
This route sits in the middle of the pack with a C. About seven flights in ten arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 7 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. The late ones land a little over an hour behind schedule. That rests on 2,219 flights, of which Envoy Air flew 379 at 78.9% on time.
Envoy Air is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 78.9% on time across 379 flights.
Key figures
On time
70.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,148 completed flights
Avg delay
79 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.93%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
Envoy
78.9% on time across 379 flights
These figures cover 2,219 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 11.1% 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 RIC
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Envoy Air arrives on time 78.9% of the time; SkyWest Airlines manages 61.9%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 718 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Air | 379 | 78.9% | 59 min | 2.11% | B |
| Republic Airways | 827 | 77.3% | 65 min | 2.42% | B |
| SkyWest Airlines | 718 | 61.9% | 96 min | 4.32% | D− |
| United Airlinesthin sample | 295 | 58.7% | 78 min | 2.03% | D |
SkyWest Airlines cancels 4.3% 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
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 23 points, against 17 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am97 flights82.3%
- 8am–11am585 flights75.9%
- 11am–2pm185 flights77.2%
- 2pm–5pm646 flights70.8%
- 5pm–8pm399 flights59.7%
- 8pm–5am307 flights62.8%
Scale runs 50% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 59.7% on time, against 82.3% 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 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 646 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 29 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 50.3% on time, against 79.7% 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. April was the busiest month here, with 243 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 76.2% on time and Friday the weakest at 65.5%. 11 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.
- 34%Carrier
- 34%Late-arriving aircraft
- 16%Extreme weather
- 15%National Airspace System
Extreme weather accounts for 16% 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 2.6 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 50,904 reported delay minutes.
34% 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 2 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 2.93%, 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. 11.1% 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.
The 642 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 77.1% on time across 2,211 flights, 7 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 7 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 2,219 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.
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 2.93% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; 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. 2,148 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
ORD to RIC questions
How often is ORD to RIC delayed?
Roughly one flight in three arrive at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 29.8% of the 2,219 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
Which airline is most reliable on ORD to RIC?
Envoy Air leads at 78.9% on time across 379 flights. SkyWest Airlines is at the other end on 61.9%, a gap of 17 points. Sample size matters as much as the percentage: a rate built from a few hundred flights moves around far more than one built from ten thousand.
What time of day has the fewest delays on ORD to RIC?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 82.3% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 59.7%, 23 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 RIC?
December is the weakest month at 50.3% on time, compared with 79.7% in May. Across the year that is 29 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
- RIC to ORD — the return legseparate record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Envoy Air on-time record78.9%
- Republic Airways on-time record77.3%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record61.9%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
Direction matters. ORD to RIC and RIC to ORD are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, July 2025 to June 2026. Updated monthly. How this data is collected.