Last Updated on June 18, 2025 by travelingwithsunscreen
“We regret to inform you that your flight is delayed.”
If those 10 words have ever thrown your family vacation into chaos, you know the feeling: frantic re-routing at the gate, missed connections, and a toddler melting down two concourses away from the snack bar. Not great. The first step towards this scenario is when you are booking your flight and see that the cheapest option has a 40 minute layover in O’Hare. You think: maybe that is a terrible idea, but it’s cheap! You book it because it will probably be fine.
I wanted to do better than probably fine. I wanted data on exactly what the risk of missing any given connection is. So I pulled 10 years of data on every US flight — tens of millions of flights! — and crunched the numbers. The result is FlightDelayPredictor.com, a free website that tells you just how risky your itinerary really is. Below, you’ll get the inside scoop on why we built it, exactly what it does, and how it can shave stress (and sometimes dollars) off your next trip.
The Problem: Airlines Know More Than They’re Telling You
InIn 2024 alone, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics logged a staggering 620 million minutes of departure delays across U.S. airports—an 18 percent jump over pre-pandemic levels that shows no signs of retreating. Taxi times at major hubs keep creeping upward as airlines squeeze more flights into the same finite runway space, creating bottlenecks that ripple through the entire system. Weather-related ground stops seem to materialize out of thin air every holiday weekend, and yet the booking platforms we all rely on offer virtually nothing beyond a tiny on-time percentage column that may or may not reflect the chaos waiting for your specific travel dates.
While customers have little information to base their flight booking decisions on, the airlines have access to incredibly detailed historical data about their own performance. They know exactly which routes struggle on Tuesday afternoons, which airports turn into parking lots during summer thunderstorms, and which connection times are statistical suicide missions. But they’re not exactly volunteering this information when you’re booking that “great deal” with a 45-minute layover in Chicago.
FlightDelayPredictor exists to level that playing field. We built it to answer two deceptively simple questions that every traveler asks but rarely gets honest answers to: “What are the odds I actually make my connection?” and “If I can’t change my destination, can I at least pick a day or time that won’t turn into a disaster?”
To answer these questions accurately, we tap into the same comprehensive, carrier-reported data that the Department of Transportation uses to grade airlines on their performance. But instead of burying these insights in government spreadsheets, we filter and visualize them in traveler-friendly ways that actually help you make better booking decisions.
I’m a parent who’s learned the hard way that a single blown connection can domino into a complete vacation disaster. Hotel rebookings, re-checked strollers, overtired kids who’ve reached their breaking point—this tool exists so you can dodge that nightmare with informed clicks instead of crossed fingers and wishful thinking.
What FlightDelayPredictor Actually Does for You
The heart of FlightDelayPredictor lies in its route-specific connection probability calculator. This tool will tell you the chances of making a given connection based on your route, airline, and flight time. Pick a route, your preferred airline, and your layover length, and we’ll run the numbers on millions of past flights to tell you the likelihood that you’ll stroll calmly onto your next gate versus frantically sprinting through three terminals with your carry-on bouncing behind you.
But connection probability is just the beginning. Our 50-airport deep-dive dashboards reveal delay patterns that most travelers never think to investigate. Ever wonder why Chicago O’Hare seems perfectly manageable on Tuesday mornings but turns into absolute chaos by Friday evening? Or why certain airlines consistently outperform others at specific airports? These patterns become clear when you can visualize ten years of data broken down by day of week, hour of day, and individual carrier performance.
Perhaps most valuable is our “Best Time to Fly” analysis, which overlays historical fare data with delay risk patterns to identify the true sweet spots in airline scheduling. These are the magical windows when tickets are not only cheapest but delays are also statistically rarest. Spoiler alert: Tuesdays in November with early morning departures often emerge as the winners, combining lower weekend demand with fresh crew schedules and less congested airspace.
If you want to know which US airports perform the best and which perform the worst, our Top-50 Airport Connection-Risk Ranking provides a comprehensive look at which hubs consistently deliver smooth connections and which ones seem designed to shred carefully planned itineraries. We stack them from best to worst, celebrating the winners and diplomatically identifying the airports where you might want to build in extra buffer time.
Your 60-Second Guide to Smarter Flight Booking
Using FlightDelayPredictor is intentionally straightforward—we built it for stressed travelers, not data scientists. Start by entering your route, like “EWR to ORD” into our search tool, along with the day of week, time of day, and airline.
Click “Estimate Probability” and you’ll see a risk assessment for your itinerary, centered on the probability of making your connection. Green means smooth sailing is likely, yellow suggests some caution, and red indicates you might want to consider alternative routing or timing.
Scroll down for data showing the average chance of a flight delay for your route, day, and airline across different time periods during the day.
With this data, you are informed of how risky any particular connection is, and you can weigh the pros and cons of the itinerary. Maybe a flight with a 65% connection probability is cheaper, and so you decide to risk it even though there is about a 2 in 5chance of missing the connection. On the other hand, maybe you have a toddler and your response is NOPE – you book a two hour connection instead to up the connection probability to 90%. It’s up to you!