One flight in six at O'Hare takes 30 minutes to reach the gate

At O’Hare, 16.2% of flights take 30 minutes or more to get from the runway to the gate. At Midway, 20 miles away, it’s 0.2%.

The median US flight takes 7 minutes from landing to gate, and 2.5% of flights take 30 or more. Trackers say “landed” at touchdown, so that gap is time the person waiting can’t see.

O’Hare is in a class of its own

Among the 40 busiest airports, O’Hare’s median is 18 minutes and its slowest 1 in 10 takes at least 36. The next airport on the 30-minute measure is DFW at 4.0%, then Seattle at 3.7% and LAX at 3.5%.

At O’Hare, 41% of flights take 20 minutes or more. No other big airport passes 13%.

If you’re meeting someone at O’Hare, “landed” means about 18 more minutes before the door even opens. At Midway it means about 4.

Evening is the slow part of O’Hare’s day

Flights landing in the 7 PM hour at O’Hare take a median 23 minutes, and the slowest 1 in 10 take at least 52. In the 11 AM hour those numbers are 15 and 24.

Other airports have a morning problem instead. LAX runs a 27-minute slow tail at 8 AM and 14 in mid-afternoon. San Francisco’s slow tail is 27 at 8 AM and 12 in the evening. Boston’s is 26 at 5 AM and 11 at noon. Overnight arrivals reaching gates still held by parked aircraft is a likely cause, though these records can’t show it.

Winter isn’t O’Hare’s slow season

O’Hare’s slowest month in this year of data was October, with a median of 20 and a slow tail of 40. January and February were the quickest, with a median of 15 and a slow tail of 32 and 30. Summer ran close to October. August was 19 and 39.

Seattle follows the same seasonal shape more plainly: 9 and 17 in January, 12 and 23 in July and August.

That’s one year of data, and each month appears once.

Your airline can matter as much as your airport

At Atlanta, the median Delta flight takes 8 minutes and the slowest 1 in 10 at least 14. Southwest’s are 6 and 10. Frontier’s are 17 and 53, over 20,177 flights. The 43-minute gap between Southwest’s slow tail and Frontier’s is the widest at any of the 30 busiest airports.

Denver shows the same pattern with bigger volumes: Southwest 6 and 9, SkyWest 10 and 23. At DFW, Frontier’s slow tail is 39 against Delta’s 15.

The records don’t name the terminal or the gate, so they can’t say why. Which gates an airline uses, and how far they sit from the runways, is the likely reason.

How this was made

Airlines report landing and gate-arrival times for every flight. I used all 6.9 million domestic flights at 360 airports from September 2025 to August 2026, with cancelled and diverted flights left out.

A median is the middle flight. “Slowest 1 in 10” is the 90th percentile, by nearest rank. Hours are the local hour of landing, and a chart hour needs at least 300 flights in the year.

Every figure on this page is measured, as reported by the airlines. Nothing here is modelled.

What this can’t tell you

It covers US airlines’ domestic flights only. Foreign airlines and flights arriving from abroad aren’t in it, so it says nothing about a long-haul arrival at JFK or LAX.

It names no terminal, runway or gate, so it can’t tell you which part of an airport is slow.

Airlines appear as the airline flying the plane. A flight sold by United and flown by SkyWest counts under SkyWest.

It doesn’t say why a flight was slow. Waiting for a gate, crossing a runway and a long route around the field all look the same.

It can’t forecast one flight. These are distributions over a year, and a storm or a closed runway isn’t visible here.

The newest month runs about seven weeks behind.

Report a wrong number. A corrected number keeps its old value struck through for 30 days.