Carrier route record

OOORD→SYR

SkyWest Airlines · Chicago to Syracuse

Flights: 241
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 11%
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 SYR draws a C−. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is an hour and a half behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 241 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.

On time

66.8%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 232 completed flights

Avg delay

84 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

3.73%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

74.7%

Every carrier on ORD to SYR, 2,189 flights

These figures cover 241 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 13.8% 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 SYR

SkyWest flew 241 of the 2,189 flights on ORD to SYR, about 11% of it. Its 66.8% on time is 8 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 74.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number four 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.

On-time performance by carrier on ORD to SYR
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 Airlines (this page)thin sample	241	66.8%	84 min	3.73%	C−
American Airlinesthin 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 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 20 points, against 8 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am46 flights76.1%
8am–11am27 flights—
11am–2pm66 flights69.4%
2pm–5pm67 flights55.6%
5pm–8pm25 flights—
8pm–5am10 flights—

Scale runs 45% to 80%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 76.1% of the time, against 55.6% for the afternoon window. That is 20 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 67 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

SkyWest on ORD to SYR through the year

Jul–Sep 202525 flights—
Oct–Dec 202598 flights68.1%
Jan–Mar 202635 flights61.8%
Apr–Jun 202683 flights62.0%

Scale runs 55% 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 66.8% on time across 241 flights.

Quarter by quarter SkyWest on ORD to SYR held fairly steady: 68.1% in Oct–Dec 2025, 61.8% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 62.0% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 6 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.

The day of the week is close to irrelevant here: 4 points separates the best day from the worst. Weekly demand peaks are not what drives the delays on this operation.

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 6,475 reported delay minutes.

Carrier
38%
Extreme weather
27%
Late-arriving aircraft
18%
National Airspace System
17%

Extreme weather accounts for 27% 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 4.4 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 6,475 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 38%, 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 2,449 of the 6,475 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations run at 3.73%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in 25 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 costs

For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 13.8% 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 59.1% on time across 241 flights, 8 points below 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 8 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 241 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 SYR

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.73% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; 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. 232 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