Route reliability record
SGF→ORD
Springfield to Chicago
- Flights
- 1,437
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 438 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route sits in the middle of the pack with a C. About seven flights in ten arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 7 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. The late ones land a little over an hour behind schedule. That rests on 1,437 SGF to ORD flights, with a median arrival 3 minutes early.
Best time to fly SGF to ORD: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 82.9% of the time and Tuesday flights 78.9%, against 70.8% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so this route runs 7 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 68 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
70.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,395 completed flights
Avg delay
80 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.71%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
Envoy
75.1% on time across 1,090 flights
These figures cover 1,437 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 12.7% 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
Which airline is most reliable on SGF to ORD
Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Air | 1,090 | 75.1% | 76 min | 2.02% | B |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 347 | 56.8% | 86 min | 4.90% | D− |
Flight by flight
Flights on SGF to ORD
The flight numbers below flew this route at least 250 times in the period, busiest first. Each has its own record, with its schedule and delay causes.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 24 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am356 flights82.9%
- 8am–11am325 flights76.9%
- 11am–2pm136 flights63.4%
- 2pm–5pm222 flights64.6%
- 5pm–8pm368 flights59.3%
- 8pm–5am30 flights—
Scale runs 50% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 59.3% on time, against 82.9% 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 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 368 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 24 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
December is the weak month at 56.7% on time, against 80.7% in May. 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. September was the busiest month here, with 160 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 78.9% on time and Sunday the weakest at 60.7%. 18 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
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 32,000 reported delay minutes.
- 35%Late-arriving aircraft
- 26%National Airspace System
- 25%Carrier
- 14%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 14% 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 2.2 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 32,357 reported delay minutes.
35% 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 32,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 3 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.
Cancellations run at 2.71%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in 40 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 actually costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 12.7% 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.
At 438 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 75.0% on time across 1,434 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,437 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in ORD after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. May runs 80.7% on time and December 56.7%, a swing of 24 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 1,395 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
SGF to ORD questions
How often is SGF to ORD delayed?
Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 29.2% of the 1,437 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
How reliable is SGF to ORD compared with the rest of the country?
70.8% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.6%, a difference of 7 points against it. That is worth a C on this site's grading scale.
What time of day has the fewest delays on SGF to ORD?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 82.9% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 59.3%, 24 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are December delays on SGF to ORD?
December is the weakest month at 56.7% on time, compared with 80.7% in May. Across the year that is 24 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to SGF — the return legseparate record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Envoy Air on SGF to ORD75.1%
- SkyWest Airlines on SGF to ORD56.8%
- SGF to DFW, a related route79.9%
- LGA to ORD, a related route67.3%
- SGF to DEN, a related route79.6%
- Envoy Air on-time record75.1%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record56.8%
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
Direction matters. SGF to ORD and ORD to SGF are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.