Route reliability record
SYR→ORD
Syracuse to Chicago
- Flights
- 2,187
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 607 mi
- Carriers
- 5
This route sits in the middle of the pack with a C−. Close to three flights in four arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 4 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. The late ones land a little over an hour behind schedule. That rests on 2,187 flights, of which Envoy Air flew 686 at 79.1% on time.
Envoy Air is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 79.1% on time across 686 flights.
Key figures
On time
74.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,111 completed flights
Avg delay
77 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.02%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
Envoy
79.1% on time across 686 flights
These figures cover 2,187 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.9% 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 SYR to ORD
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Envoy Air arrives on time 79.1% of the time; Republic Airways manages 72.7%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 752 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| American Airlinesthin sample | 103 | 79.2% | 103 min | 1.94% | B |
| Envoy Air | 686 | 79.1% | 82 min | 2.62% | B |
| United Airlines | 405 | 75.3% | 60 min | 1.73% | B |
| Republic Airways | 752 | 72.7% | 79 min | 3.86% | C− |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 241 | 59.1% | 76 min | 4.15% | D− |
Republic Airways cancels 3.9% 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
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 26 points, against 6 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am684 flights81.1%
- 8am–11am154 flights79.3%
- 11am–2pm416 flights80.7%
- 2pm–5pm228 flights79.6%
- 5pm–8pm570 flights60.8%
- 8pm–5am135 flights54.9%
Scale runs 45% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 54.9% on time, against 81.1% 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 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 684 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 30 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 55.4% on time, against 85.7% 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. October was the busiest month here, with 223 flights.
Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 76.2% on time and Monday the weakest at 71.0%. 5 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 42,000 reported delay minutes.
- 33%Late-arriving aircraft
- 29%National Airspace System
- 26%Carrier
- 12%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
Extreme weather accounts for 12% 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 42,034 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 81.1% on time here.
Cancellations run at 3.02%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly 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
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 9.9% 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 607 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 runs 74.7% on time across 2,189 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.
The sample behind these figures is 2,187 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.
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.02% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; 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. 2,111 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
SYR to ORD questions
How often is SYR to ORD delayed?
About one flight in four arrive at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 26.0% of the 2,187 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
Which airline is most reliable on SYR to ORD?
Envoy Air leads at 79.1% on time across 686 flights. Republic Airways is at the other end on 72.7%, a gap of 6 points. Sample size matters as much as the percentage: a rate built from a few hundred flights moves around far more than one built from ten thousand.
What time of day has the fewest delays on SYR to ORD?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 81.1% on time. The 8pm–5am window is the weakest at 54.9%, 26 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 SYR to ORD?
December is the weakest month at 55.4% on time, compared with 85.7% in May. Across the year that is 30 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 SYR — the return legseparate record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- American Airlines on-time record79.2%
- Envoy Air on-time record79.1%
- United Airlines on-time record75.3%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
Direction matters. SYR to ORD and ORD to SYR are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, July 2025 to June 2026. Updated monthly. How this data is collected.