Route reliability record
SGF→ORD
Springfield to Chicago
- Flights
- 1,453
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Distance
- 438 mi
- Carriers
- 2
This route carries a cancellation problem, not just a delay problem: 3.3% of scheduled flights never operate, against 1.9% nationally. Of the ones that do fly, about seven flights in ten arrive on time, worth a C− overall. The punctuality figure counts only flights that actually departed, so it flatters an operation that cancels this often. That rests on 1,453 SGF to ORD flights, with a median arrival 5 minutes early.
Best time to fly SGF to ORD: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 81.8% of the time and Tuesday flights 78.4%, against 71.2% for the route overall.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so this route runs 6 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 61 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
71.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,404 completed flights
Avg delay
85 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.30%
National rate is 1.89%
Best carrier
Envoy
76.3% on time across 1,118 flights
These figures cover 1,453 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 13.2% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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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 | 1,118 | 76.3% | 85 min | 2.50% | B |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 335 | 53.3% | 84 min | 5.97% | F− |
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.
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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 23 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier.
- 5am–8am356 flights81.8%
- 8am–11am325 flights78.4%
- 11am–2pm123 flights62.8%
- 2pm–5pm194 flights68.4%
- 5pm–8pm363 flights59.2%
- 8pm–5am92 flights65.0%
Scale runs 50% to 85%.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 59.2% on time, against 81.8% 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 363 flights scheduled in it.
Explore
Filter SGF to ORD by airline, time, month and day
Pick a breakdown and a carrier. The dashed mark on each row is the same slice for every US flight.
On SGF to ORD, the best departure window is 5am–8am at 81.8% on time and the worst is 5pm–8pm at 59.2%, a wide gap of 22.6 points. All US flights leaving 5am–8am ran 89.3%.
- 5–8am81.8%
- 8–11am78.4%
- 11am–2pm62.8%
- 2–5pm68.4%
- 5–8pm59.2%
- 8pm–5am65.0%
best all US flightsScale 50% to 95%.
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 78.4% on time and Sunday the weakest at 65.0%, a spread of 13 points.
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 34,000 reported delay minutes.
- 36%Late-arriving aircraft
- 25%Carrier
- 25%National Airspace System
- 13%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 13% 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 34,231 reported delay minutes.
36% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 34,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 3 to one.
Cancellations run at 3.30%, against 1.89% nationally. That is about one flight in 30 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
13.2% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection 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 74.5% on time across 1,450 flights, 3 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 3 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,453 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 delay figures matter less here than the 3.30% 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. 1,404 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 28.8% of the 1,453 flights in this analysis, against 22.7% nationally. Delayed flights are late by an hour and a half on average.
How reliable is SGF to ORD compared with the rest of the country?
71.2% of flights arrive on time here against a national 77.3%, a difference of 6 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 81.8% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 59.2%, 23 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 ORD76.3%
- SkyWest Airlines on SGF to ORD53.3%
- SGF to DFW, a related route82.0%
- LGA to ORD, a related route66.7%
- SGF to DEN, a related route80.5%
- Envoy Air on-time record76.3%
- SkyWest Airlines on-time record53.3%
- 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, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.