Carrier route record

UAORD→RIC

United Airlines · Chicago to Richmond

Flights: 295
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 13%
Carriers: 4

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with United Airlines.

United on ORD to RIC draws a D. Roughly one flight in two arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 295 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, 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.

On time

58.7%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 288 completed flights

Avg delay

78 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

2.03%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

70.2%

Every carrier on ORD to RIC, 2,219 flights

These figures cover 295 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 15.6% 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

United against every carrier on ORD to RIC

United flew 295 of the 2,219 flights on ORD to RIC, about 13% of it. Its 58.7% on time is 12 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 70.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 78.9% to United at 58.7%.

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.

On-time performance by carrier on ORD to RIC
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 Airlines (this page)thin 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

When United runs best on this route

Departure time is the single lever a traveller controls, and it moves the odds more than most people expect. Each bar below is the on-time rate for flights scheduled to leave inside that window, across 295 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split United's ORD to RIC record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 58.7% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

United on ORD to RIC through the year

Jul–Sep 202590 flights54.5%
Oct–Dec 202583 flights61.0%
Jan–Mar 202632 flights46.7%
Apr–Jun 202690 flights64.8%

Scale runs 40% 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 58.7% on time across 295 flights.

United on ORD to RIC did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Apr–Jun 2026 at 64.8% on time and its weakest Jan–Mar 2026 at 46.7%, a swing of 18 points on roughly 74 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, Saturday is the strongest day at 76.7% on time and Wednesday the weakest at 50.0%. 27 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why United runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 60% of the 9,320 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.

Late-arriving aircraft
60%
Carrier
20%
National Airspace System
14%
Extreme weather
6%

60% 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 9,320 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 10 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 9,320 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations sit at 2.03% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.34%.

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. 15.6% 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.

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 84.7% on time across 295 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. 295 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 United on ORD to RIC

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 295 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 58.7% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 288 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

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.

Key figures