The sector is held by TAP Air Portugal.
Airport pair · hand carry reference
LIS Lisbon to ORD Chicago
Lisbon Humberto Delgado, Portugal, to O'Hare International, the United States. Computed from the scheduled network held on 2026-09-07.
- Nonstop
- 4.1 times a week
- Great circle
- 6,435 km
- Block, estimated
- 8h 15m
- Door to door
- 15h 00m
What LIS to ORD looks like
The LIS to ORD sector, the carriers on it and the flying time, before anything is promised to anybody.
Lisbon LIS to Chicago ORD is a long haul sector of 6,435 km by great circle, flown nonstop 4.1 times a week.
At the cruise speed this site models for 6,435 km, 880 km an hour, and thirty minutes of taxi at the two ends, the flight blocks at about 8h 15m.
Lisbon LIS is a major hub in the network held here, 154 scheduled destinations and 367.9 departures a day. Chicago ORD has 295 destinations and 1,461 departures a day.
Chicago carries about 4 times the departures of Lisbon, so a courier who has to be rebooked has far more to work with at one end of this pair than at the other.
Chicago is 6 hours behind of Lisbon all year.
The pair sits between the Americas and Europe, a corridor where the site already publishes 36 written lanes that go into customs and ground detail this page does not.
Who flies the sector, and how often
Average daily frequencies on LIS to ORD from the scheduled route statistics, both directions, with the operating carriers named.
| Direction | Flights a day | Flights a week | Operated by |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIS to ORD | 0.59 | 4.1 | TAP Air Portugal |
| ORD to LIS | 0.71 | 5 | TAP Air Portugal |
One carrier holds the sector, TAP Air Portugal, so a cancellation has no second nonstop behind it and the connections below stop being theoretical.
Between them the two directions put about 9.1 departures a week on LIS to ORD, 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 8h 15m block time on LIS to ORD. Change any of them in the tool further down and the total moves with them.
| Stage | Allowed | Elapsed |
|---|---|---|
| Collection and the run to LIS | 90 min | 1h 30m |
| At LIS before departure | 180 min | 4h 30m |
| LIS to ORD in the air, estimated | 495 min | 12h 45m |
| Formalities at ORD | 90 min | 14h 15m |
| Delivery run in Chicago | 45 min | 15h 00m |
| Door to door | 900 min | 15h 00m |
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 LIS to ORD is 15h 00m.
A courier who leaves Lisbon at 09:00 local is on the ground in Chicago at about 11:15 local and at the door by 13:30 the same day.
Working backwards from a six in the evening handover in Chicago, the last useful departure from Lisbon is around 13:30 local.
At 15h 00m the mission uses most of a sixteen hour duty day, which leaves no room for a delay before a rest at the far end becomes the honest answer.
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. 43 of them join LIS to ORD.
| Connecting at | LIS to hub, flights a day | Hub to ORD, flights a day | Track, km | Estimated, gate to gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Montreal YUL | 2.71 | 10.29 | 6,436 | 10h 05m |
| Toronto YYZ | 4 | 22.14 | 6,441 | 10h 12m |
| Boston BOS | 3.43 | 29.71 | 6,515 | 10h 12m |
| Philadelphia PHL | 1.14 | 19.43 | 6,639 | 10h 19m |
| Newark EWR | 3.43 | 21 | 6,587 | 10h 31m |
| New York JFK | 2.01 | 11.57 | 6,592 | 10h 32m |
43 airports connect the two ends on the scheduled network held here. The quickest of the dependable ones is Montreal YUL, where the weaker of the two legs still runs about twice a day.
Through YUL the routing covers 6,436 km against the 6,435 km nonstop track and takes about 10h 05m in the air and on the ground at the hub, allowing 75 minutes to connect at an airport of that size.
That is only 1h 50m more than the nonstop, which is close enough that a connection is worth taking when the nonstop is full or badly timed.
Behind it, Toronto YYZ at 10h 12m and Boston BOS at 10h 12m hold the same connection, so a booking has three hubs to try before it has to wait for the nonstop.
If nothing suitable leaves Lisbon, Faro FAO is 222 km away by great circle and carries 87 scheduled destinations of its own, which is usually a shorter road transfer than a lost day.
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.
Plan Lisbon to Chicago 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 LIS to ORD 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 LIS airport entry
- The ORD airport entry
- Hand carry into Portugal
- Hand carry into the United States
- The written lane, Dubai to Lisbon
- The written lane, Lisbon to Sao Paulo
- The written lane, Abu Dhabi to Chicago
- The route calculator
More pairs through LIS and ORD: Madrid to Lisbon, Barcelona to Lisbon, London to Lisbon, Lisbon to Amsterdam, Frankfurt to Lisbon, Paris to Lisbon, Boston to Lisbon, Zurich to Lisbon.