ORD Chicago

How deep the ORD board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from ORD. This reads the same 295 destinations back for the questions a dispatcher asks second: how much of the board rests on one airline, how much of it runs less than daily, whether the return leg is as thick as the outbound, what the clock here does to a Gulf working day and which of the destinations shut at night, all of it computed on 2026-09-07 from AeroDataBox scheduled route statistics.

• 103of the 295 destinations are flown by one airline
• 68destinations run less than once a day
• 113destinations have four or more departures a day
• 66.1%of the destinations name United Airlines, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at ORD

76 airlines appear on the ORD board and they do not hold it evenly. United Airlines is on 195 of the 295 destinations, 66.1 per cent of them, and on 37 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 1320.3 of the 1461 departures a day this airport files, though other airlines fly some of the same sectors, so read that as reach rather than as a share of the aircraft.

The next largest presence is American Airlines on 162 destinations. 39 of the 76 airlines at ORD appear on a single destination each, which is the long tail every airport carries, and none of it is a rebooking option when the sector you need is the one that fell over.

An airport held this tightly is quick to book and slow to recover: with 195 of the 295 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on an ORD sector is usually another United Airlines aircraft, and when there is not one the desk is looking at another airport rather than another airline. That is why the alternate airports listed above matter more at ORD than the destination count does.

How much of the ORD board is daily

Of the 295 destinations, 227 are flown at least once a day and 68 are not, 27 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the ORD board is flown about twice a day.

An average of 0.14 flights a day is the schedule statistic, and it is worth translating it before anything is promised to anybody: ORD to Van Nuys (VNY) is about one a week, so a missed departure there is not a delay of hours, it is the next slot.

The five busiest destinations carry 134.3 of the 1461 departures a day, 9.2 per cent of the whole board. The other 290 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at ORD usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Baku GYD	Azerbaijan	Silk Way West	1	9,918	plan this
Cincinnati LUK	the United States	NetJets Aviation	1	435	plan this
Cody COD	the United States	United Airlines	1	1,729	plan this
Denver APA	the United States	WUP	1	1,449	plan this
Detroit YIP	the United States	Flexjet	1	362	plan this
Ezhou EHU	China	Atlas Air	1	11,637	plan this
Georgetown GGE	the United States	Contour Aviation	1	1,223	plan this
Goteborg GOT	Sweden	National Airlines	1	6,710	plan this
Grand Junction GJT	the United States	United Airlines	1	1,767	plan this
Hahn HHN	Germany	Silk Way West	1	6,898	plan this

The ten destinations out of ORD where one airline holds the sector and files fewer than seven departures a week, with the weekly figure taken as the average daily rate multiplied by seven rather than as a fixed timetable. 45 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from ORD

The desk holds the return direction for 110 of the 295 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On eleven of them the return into ORD runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Osaka (KIX) at 0.86 out a day against 0.14 back, Seoul (ICN) at 4.7 out a day against 1.1 back and Guatemala City (GUA) at 0.43 out a day against 0.14 back.

It runs the other way as well: Anchorage (ANC) files 20.1 a day back into ORD against 8.9 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at ORD

ORD keeps America/Chicago time, nine hours behind Dubai in summer and ten hours behind in winter, because the clock here moves and the Gulf clock does not.

When it is 09:00 on a Dubai working morning it is 00:00 at ORD, and a nine to six day at each end does not overlap at all, so an instruction written in Dubai is read here on the following working day unless somebody is woken up.

The night at ORD

10 of the destinations from here carry a documented night restriction of their own, which is a departure time question at this end rather than an arrival problem at the other.

Into London (LHR) the door shuts at 23:30 local, so the last departure from ORD that lands inside it leaves around 09:22, on a modelled block of 8h 08m. Into Frankfurt-am-Main (FRA) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from ORD that lands inside it leaves around 07:06, on a modelled block of 8h 54m. Into Tokyo (NRT) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from ORD that lands inside it leaves around 20:22, on a modelled block of 12h 38m. Those three departure times out of ORD are worked backwards from the published window with the block time model this site uses everywhere, 720 to 880 km an hour by sector length with thirty minutes on the ground, so they are arithmetic rather than a timetable and the desk checks the published departure before it promises the landing.

Where ORD turns up on the rest of this site

ORD carries two other pages on this site as well: the United States country desk, which sets out the customs practice, the working week and the road legs behind this airport and the ORD transit page for the connecting case, where a courier changes aircraft here rather than starting or finishing.

The site publishes 53 airport pair pages that start or end at ORD, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Chicago to Boston (BOS), Chicago to Los Angeles (LAX) and Chicago to Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW).

Five of the 346 published hand carry lanes run through this airport: Abu Dhabi to Chicago, Chicago to Frankfurt and Chicago to Queretaro. A lane page is the commercial version of the board above, with the customs, the ground legs and the price at ORD written out.

16 courier postings name ORD as the airport a courier here flies from: Milwaukee, Aurora and Rockford.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with ORD already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 295 destinations above.