Carrier route record
AAORD→SYR
American Airlines · Chicago to Syracuse
- Flights
- 103
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 5%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with American Airlines.
American on ORD to SYR 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 an hour and a half. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 103 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Envoy Air, flew 686 at 78.8% on time.
Envoy Air is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 78.8% on time across 686 flights.
Key figures
On time
50.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 102 completed flights
Avg delay
98 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.97%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
74.7%
Every carrier on ORD to SYR, 2,189 flights
These figures cover 103 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 27.5% 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 SYR
American flew 103 of the 2,189 flights on ORD to SYR, about 5% of it. Its 50.0% on time is 25 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 74.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 78.8% to American at 50.0%. One 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 78.8% of the time; United Airlines manages 71.2%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 405 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Air | 686 | 78.8% | 56 min | 2.77% | B |
| Republic Airways | 754 | 78.8% | 77 min | 3.05% | B− |
| United Airlines | 405 | 71.2% | 79 min | 1.23% | C |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 241 | 66.8% | 84 min | 3.73% | C− |
| American Airlines (this page)thin sample | 103 | 50.0% | 98 min | 0.97% | F+ |
Republic Airways cancels 3.0% 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 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 103 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split American's ORD to SYR record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 50.0% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
American on ORD to SYR through the year
- Jul–Sep 202572 flights49.3%
- Oct–Dec 202531 flights51.6%
Scale runs 40% to 55%. 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 103 flights.
Split by quarter, American on ORD to SYR logged 72 flights in Jul–Sep 2025 and 31 flights in Oct–Dec 2025. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 50.0% annual figure is the one to use.
Delay causes
Why American runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 65% of the 4,973 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.
- 65%Late-arriving aircraft
- 27%Carrier
- 7%National Airspace System
- 2%Extreme weather
65% 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 4,973 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 35 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 4,973 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations sit at 0.97% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
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. 27.5% 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 607 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 79.2% on time across 103 flights, 29 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 29 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 103 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 SYR
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 103 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. 102 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to SYR, every carrier
- American on SYR to ORD, the return leg
- Envoy Air on ORD to SYR78.8%
- Republic Airways on ORD to SYR78.8%
- United Airlines on ORD to SYR71.2%
- SkyWest Airlines on ORD to SYR66.8%
- American Airlines network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
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.