Carrier route record

OOORD→SLC

SkyWest Airlines · Chicago to Salt Lake City

Flights: 113
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 4%
Carriers: 5

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

SkyWest on ORD to SLC earns a D+, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 56.2% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 21 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average an hour and a half. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 113 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 1,011 at 71.8% on time.

Delta Air Lines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 71.8% on time across 1,011 flights.

On time

56.2%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 112 completed flights

Avg delay

87 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.88%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

68.8%

Every carrier on ORD to SLC, 3,198 flights

These figures cover 113 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 24.1% 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

SkyWest against every carrier on ORD to SLC

SkyWest flew 113 of the 3,198 flights on ORD to SLC, about 4% of it. Its 56.2% on time is 13 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 68.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 71.8% to SkyWest at 56.2%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Delta Air Lines arrives on time 71.8% of the time; American Airlines manages 64.2%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 969 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on ORD to SLC
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Delta Air Lines	1,011	71.8%	105 min	0.79%	C+
United Airlines	1,069	71.7%	64 min	0.84%	C+
American Airlines	969	64.2%	69 min	1.96%	D
Envoy Airthin sample	36	61.1%	48 min	0.00%	D+
SkyWest Airlines (this page)thin sample	113	56.2%	87 min	0.88%	D+

Delta leads American by 8 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh 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 29 points, against 8 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am4 flights—
8am–11am—
11am–2pm38 flights76.3%
2pm–5pm71 flights47.1%
5pm–8pm—
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 40% to 80%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The best window here is not the first bank but the 11am–2pm slot at 76.3% on time, ahead of 2pm–5pm at 47.1%. Where the curve peaks mid-day rather than at dawn, the constraint is usually congestion at one end rather than the aircraft's own rotation. The 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 71 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on ORD to SLC through the year

Jul–Sep 202536 flights25.0%
Oct–Dec 202523 flights—
Jan–Mar 20264 flights—
Apr–Jun 202650 flights71.4%

Scale runs 15% to 75%. 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 56.2% on time across 113 flights.

Split by quarter, SkyWest on ORD to SLC logged 36 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 23 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 4 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 50 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 56.2% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why SkyWest runs late on this route

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 4,274 reported delay minutes.

Carrier
36%
National Airspace System
27%
Extreme weather
17%
Late-arriving aircraft
17%
Security
3%

Extreme weather accounts for 17% 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 2.7 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 4,274 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 36%, 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 1,559 of the 4,274 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.88%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Roughly one flight in 100 is called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.

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. 24.1% 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 1,250 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 77.0% on time across 115 flights, 21 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 21 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 113 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 SLC

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 113 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 56.2% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 112 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