Carrier route record
MQSTL→ORD
Envoy Air · St. Louis to Chicago
- Flights
- 728
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 24%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Envoy Air.
Envoy on STL to ORD sits in the middle of the pack with a C. Close to three flights in four arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 3 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. The late ones land an hour and a half behind schedule. That rests on 728 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 533 at 80.7% on time.
American Airlines is the most reliable of the four carriers covered here at 80.7% on time across 533 flights.
Key figures
On time
74.6%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 709 completed flights
Avg delay
93 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.61%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
71.1%
Every carrier on STL to ORD, 3,070 flights
These figures cover 728 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.3% 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
Envoy against every carrier on STL to ORD
Envoy flew 728 of the 3,070 flights on STL to ORD, about 24% of it. Its 74.6% on time is 4 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 71.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from American at 80.7% to SkyWest at 62.8%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. American Airlines arrives on time 80.7% of the time; SkyWest Airlines manages 62.8%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 836 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| American Airlines | 533 | 80.7% | 126 min | 2.44% | B |
| Envoy Air (this page) | 728 | 74.6% | 93 min | 2.61% | C |
| Republic Airways | 448 | 72.0% | 76 min | 4.02% | C− |
| United Airlines | 525 | 68.6% | 85 min | 1.52% | C |
| SkyWest Airlines | 836 | 62.8% | 104 min | 4.90% | D− |
SkyWest Airlines cancels 4.9% 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 Envoy runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 29 points, against 18 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am39 flights87.2%
- 8am–11am245 flights82.3%
- 11am–2pm64 flights58.7%
- 2pm–5pm237 flights75.7%
- 5pm–8pm87 flights62.2%
- 8pm–5am56 flights63.5%
Scale runs 50% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 58.7% on time against 87.2% for 5am–8am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 245 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Envoy on STL to ORD through the year
Delays peak in October, when the on-time rate falls to 63.3%. February is the strongest month at 84.6%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 21 points. March was the busiest month here, with 123 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 87.3% on time and Friday the weakest at 68.3%. 19 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Envoy runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 44% of the 17,000 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.
- 44%Late-arriving aircraft
- 30%National Airspace System
- 18%Extreme weather
- 8%Carrier
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 18% 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 3.0 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 16,785 reported delay minutes.
44% 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 17,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 2 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 2.61%, 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 costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 9.3% 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 258 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 runs 75.0% on time across 727 flights, within half a point of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 728 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 Envoy on STL to ORD
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 728 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 74.6% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 709 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- STL to ORD, every carrier
- Envoy on ORD to STL, the return leg
- American Airlines on STL to ORD80.7%
- Republic Airways on STL to ORD72.0%
- United Airlines on STL to ORD68.6%
- SkyWest Airlines on STL to ORD62.8%
- Envoy Air network-wide record
- St. Louis Lambert International (STL) delay statistics
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
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.