Carrier route record

OOSAT→ORD

SkyWest Airlines · San Antonio to Chicago

Flights: 104
Period: September 2025 to August 2026
Share of route: 5%
Carriers: 5

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

SkyWest on SAT to ORD sits in the middle of the pack with a C−. About seven flights in ten arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 9 points worse than the national rate of 77.3%. The late ones land roughly 50 minutes behind schedule. That rests on 104 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 889 at 78.9% on time.

United Airlines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 78.9% on time across 889 flights.

On time

68.4%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 98 completed flights

Avg delay

52 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

5.77%

National rate is 1.89%

Whole route

76.4%

Every carrier on SAT to ORD, 2,004 flights

These figures cover 104 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 8.2% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.

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Carrier by carrier

SkyWest against every carrier on SAT to ORD

SkyWest flew 104 of the 2,004 flights on SAT to ORD, about 5% of it. Its 68.4% on time is 8 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 76.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 78.9% to SkyWest at 68.4%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The three carriers here are closely matched: 5 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.

On-time performance by carrier on SAT to ORD
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
United Airlines	889	78.9%	87 min	1.12%	B
Envoy Air	410	76.1%	69 min	3.17%	B−
Republic Airwaysthin sample	101	74.7%	54 min	4.95%	C−
American Airlines	500	74.2%	87 min	1.80%	C
SkyWest Airlines (this page)thin sample	104	68.4%	52 min	5.77%	C−

Envoy Air cancels 3.2% 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.

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Departure window

When SkyWest 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 104 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split SkyWest's SAT to ORD record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 68.4% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

SkyWest on SAT to ORD through the year

Jul–Sep 20252 flights—
Oct–Dec 202550 flights70.2%
Jan–Mar 202639 flights67.6%
Apr–Jun 202613 flights—

Scale runs 60% 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 68.4% on time across 104 flights.

Split by quarter, SkyWest on SAT to ORD logged 2 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 50 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 39 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 13 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 68.4% 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 1,621 reported delay minutes.

Carrier
41%
Late-arriving aircraft
33%
National Airspace System
15%
Extreme weather
11%

Extreme weather accounts for 11% 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 1.9 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 1,621 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 41%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 665 of the 1,621 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations run at 5.77%, against 1.89% nationally. That is roughly one flight in fifteen 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

8.2% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.3%, so a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last roughly 50 minutes, which a normal layover absorbs.

The 1,041 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.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 79.0% on time across 104 flights, 11 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 11 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 104 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 SAT to ORD

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 5.77% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you roughly 50 minutes; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 5pm–8pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 98 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated 22 October 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.

Key figures