The sector is held by Air Canada, American Airlines, Envoy Air and United Airlines.
Airport pair · hand carry reference
ORD Chicago to YUL Montreal
O'Hare International, the United States, to Montreal Trudeau, Canada. Computed from the scheduled network held on 2026-09-07.
- Nonstop
- 10.7 times a day
- Great circle
- 1,201 km
- Block, estimated
- 2h 02m
- Door to door
- 8h 47m
What ORD to YUL looks like
The ORD to YUL sector, the carriers on it and the flying time, before anything is promised to anybody.
Chicago ORD to Montreal YUL is a medium haul sector of 1,201 km by great circle, flown nonstop 10.7 times a day.
At the cruise speed this site models for 1,201 km, 830 km an hour, and thirty minutes of taxi at the two ends, the flight blocks at about 2h 02m.
Chicago ORD is a major hub in the network held here, 295 scheduled destinations and 1,461 departures a day. Montreal YUL has 157 destinations and 317.8 departures a day.
Chicago carries about 4.6 times the departures of Montreal, so a courier who has to be rebooked has far more to work with at one end of this pair than at the other.
Montreal is one hour ahead of Chicago all year.
The pair sits inside the Americas, a corridor where the site already publishes 13 written lanes that go into customs and ground detail this page does not.
Who flies the sector, and how often
Average daily frequencies on ORD to YUL from the scheduled route statistics, both directions, with the operating carriers named.
| Direction | Flights a day | Flights a week | Operated by |
|---|---|---|---|
| ORD to YUL | 10.71 | 75 | Air Canada, American Airlines, Envoy Air, United Airlines |
| YUL to ORD | 10.29 | 72 | Air Canada, American Airlines, Envoy Air, United Airlines |
4 carriers are recorded on the sector, so a missed departure is normally a rebooking rather than a lost day.
At 10.7 times a day there is usually another departure within a few hours, which is what makes a same day booking on this pair realistic.
Between them the two directions put about 147 departures a week on ORD to YUL, which is the number that decides whether a seat can be found today or on Thursday.
The clock from collection to signature
The same ground timings the route calculator starts from, applied to the 2h 02m block time on ORD to YUL. Change any of them in the tool further down and the total moves with them.
| Stage | Allowed | Elapsed |
|---|---|---|
| Collection and the run to ORD | 90 min | 1h 30m |
| At ORD before departure | 180 min | 4h 30m |
| ORD to YUL in the air, estimated | 122 min | 6h 32m |
| Formalities at YUL | 90 min | 8h 02m |
| Delivery run in Montreal | 45 min | 8h 47m |
| Door to door | 527 min | 8h 47m |
On the desk standard ground timings, ninety minutes to collect and reach the airport, three hours at the airport before departure, ninety minutes of arrival formalities and a forty five minute delivery run, the door to door figure for ORD to YUL is 8h 47m.
A courier who leaves Chicago at 09:00 local is on the ground in Montreal at about 12:02 local and at the door by 14:17 the same day.
Working backwards from a six in the evening handover in Montreal, the last useful departure from Chicago is around 12:43 local.
When the nonstop does not work
Every airport that joins the two ends, ranked by when they land, among the ones whose weaker leg is dependable enough to plan on. Connection time is allowed for the size of the hub. 71 of them join ORD to YUL.
| Connecting at | ORD to hub, flights a day | Hub to YUL, flights a day | Track, km | Estimated, gate to gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ottawa YOW | 3.43 | 12.43 | 1,202 | 3h 34m |
| Detroit DTW | 21.43 | 4.43 | 1,227 | 3h 53m |
| Toronto YYZ | 18.86 | 25.57 | 1,207 | 4h 02m |
| Quebec City YQB | 2.43 | 11.71 | 1,647 | 4h 09m |
| Cleveland CLE | 17.29 | 1.14 | 1,302 | 4h 10m |
| Columbus CMH | 17.14 | 1.43 | 1,438 | 4h 11m |
With 10.7 times a day on the nonstop, a connection here is a disruption plan rather than a routing, and it is listed because a closed runway or a cancellation wave is exactly when nobody has time to work it out.
71 airports connect the two ends on the scheduled network held here. The quickest of the dependable ones is Ottawa YOW, where the weaker of the two legs still runs 3.4 times a day.
Through YOW the routing covers 1,202 km against the 1,201 km nonstop track and takes about 3h 34m in the air and on the ground at the hub, allowing 60 minutes to connect at an airport of that size.
That is only 1h 32m more than the nonstop, which is close enough that a connection is worth taking when the nonstop is full or badly timed.
Behind it, Detroit DTW at 3h 53m and Toronto YYZ at 4h 02m hold the same connection, so a booking has three hubs to try before it has to wait for the nonstop.
If nothing suitable leaves Chicago, Chicago MDW is 25 km away by great circle and carries 208 scheduled destinations of its own, which is usually a shorter road transfer than a lost day.
If nothing suitable leaves Montreal, Ottawa YOW is 151 km away by great circle and carries 45 scheduled destinations of its own, which is usually a shorter road transfer than a lost day.
Plan Chicago to Montreal yourself
The same tool the dispatchers use, open to anybody and free. It is loaded with this pair already. Change either end, add a stopover or a preferred airline, and it works out the connection, the transit and the door to door clock, with the real departures underneath. Put it on your own site if it is useful to you.
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Restrictions
Where this came from, and where to look next
- Carriers and frequencies: AeroDataBox scheduled route statistics, retrieved 2026-09-07. Average daily flights, not a timetable.
- Distances: great circle from published coordinates. They read short against a flown track, which is why the block time above applies a factor to them.
- Block and connection times: the same model the route calculator lower down this page runs, at the same rounding.
- Restrictions: the airport notes file, checked 2026-09-07.
- Industrial sites: public company information. Nothing here says or implies that any company named is a customer of any courier operator.
Who publishes this. OnBoard Courier is a placement desk in Dubai. An assignment is carried out by a vetted partner operator, with the desk as the single point of contact from the quote to the signature. This page exists because our own dispatchers need the answer for ORD to YUL in the twenty minutes before a promise is made, and a reference only one operator can read is not a reference. Free to read, quote and cite. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it.
If you need something moved rather than looked up, the desk prices a hand carry in fifteen minutes.
- The ORD airport entry
- The YUL airport entry
- Hand carry into the United States
- Hand carry into Canada
- The written lane, Abu Dhabi to Chicago
- The written lane, Chicago to Frankfurt
- The written lane, Chicago to Queretaro
- The route calculator
More pairs through ORD and YUL: Chicago to Boston, Chicago to Atlanta, London to Chicago, San Francisco to Chicago, Seattle to Chicago, Chicago to Detroit, Chicago to Paris, Chicago to Dublin.