Carrier route record
OORIC→ORD
SkyWest Airlines · Richmond to Chicago
- Flights
- 719
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 33%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with SkyWest Airlines.
SkyWest on RIC to ORD draws a C−. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is close to two hours behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 719 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Republic Airways, flew 818 at 82.4% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so SkyWest on RIC to ORD runs 12 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 115 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
66.1%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 681 completed flights
Avg delay
115 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
4.59%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
77.1%
Every carrier on RIC to ORD, 2,211 flights
These figures cover 719 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 15.7% 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 RIC to ORD
SkyWest flew 719 of the 2,211 flights on RIC to ORD, about 33% of it. Its 66.1% on time is 11 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 77.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 84.7% to SkyWest at 66.1%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 2 points separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlinesthin sample | 295 | 84.7% | 58 min | 2.03% | B |
| Republic Airways | 818 | 82.4% | 88 min | 3.67% | B− |
| Envoy Air | 379 | 80.1% | 69 min | 3.17% | B− |
| SkyWest Airlines (this page) | 719 | 66.1% | 115 min | 4.59% | C− |
Republic Airways cancels 3.7% 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 42 points, against 2 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am199 flights78.4%
- 8am–11am5 flights—
- 11am–2pm253 flights73.4%
- 2pm–5pm60 flights40.7%
- 5pm–8pm84 flights71.4%
- 8pm–5am118 flights36.8%
Scale runs 30% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 36.8% on time, against 78.4% 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 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 253 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
SkyWest on RIC to ORD through the year
December is the weak month at 42.0% on time, against 78.3% in January. 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. July was the busiest month here, with 111 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 74.2% on time and Friday the weakest at 60.6%. 14 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why SkyWest runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 51% of the 27,000 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.
- 51%Carrier
- 19%National Airspace System
- 17%Extreme weather
- 13%Late-arriving aircraft
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 26,530 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 51%, 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 14,000 of the 27,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations run at 4.59%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly one flight in twenty 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. 15.7% 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 61.9% on time across 718 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 719 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 RIC to ORD
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.59% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you close to two hours; 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. 681 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- RIC to ORD, every carrier
- SkyWest on ORD to RIC, the return leg
- United Airlines on RIC to ORD84.7%
- Republic Airways on RIC to ORD82.4%
- Envoy Air on RIC to ORD80.1%
- SkyWest Airlines network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- What a cancellation rate actually tells you (and what it hides)
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.