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Chicago O’Hare International Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport are emerging as global symbols of flight disruption, with recent data showing both U.S. hubs near the top of worldwide rankings for delays and cancellations.
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Fresh Rankings Put U.S. Hubs in the Global Spotlight
Recent disruption reports from AirHelp, a passenger rights and data firm, place Newark Liberty at the top of the list of most disrupted major U.S. airports in 2025, with 29.1 percent of passengers experiencing a delay or cancellation. Chicago O’Hare follows close behind, with 29 percent of travelers disrupted, a share matched only by New York LaGuardia among large U.S. hubs. These rankings focus on airports serving more than 10 million passengers a year, making the findings particularly significant for global travelers.
Separate AirHelp data that tracked disruption rates during earlier seasonal snapshots showed similarly high levels of operational strain at O’Hare. A 2024 analysis of spring and early-summer performance identified O’Hare as one of the most disrupted U.S. airports by share of affected flights, a pattern that has continued into the latest full-year review of 2025 performance. Publicly available summaries of these figures indicate that disruption has become a structural feature of operations at both airports rather than a short-lived anomaly.
Industry coverage of the 2025 AirHelp Disruption Report notes that these rankings compare airports on the combined rate of delays and cancellations rather than passenger satisfaction or amenities. As a result, Chicago and Newark appear near the top not because they are the busiest airports in the world, but because a higher-than-average share of flights fails to operate on schedule.
Travel media that examined the same dataset reached similar conclusions, describing Newark as “the most disruptive airport in 2025” and highlighting O’Hare’s nearly identical disruption rate. For international and domestic passengers connecting through U.S. hubs, this clustering at the top of global disruption tables is becoming a key factor in routing decisions.
High Traffic and Complex Operations Drive Chronic Delays
Volume is a central part of the story. According to global air traffic statistics compiled by aviation authorities and industry groups, Chicago O’Hare consistently ranks among the world’s busiest airports by aircraft movements and passenger volume, while Newark is a major component of the New York metropolitan airport system, itself one of the highest-traffic city airport networks worldwide. These rankings underscore that even a modest deterioration in on-time performance at such hubs can translate into large numbers of disrupted passengers.
Federal Aviation Administration performance reports for fiscal years 2023 and 2024 show that O’Hare and Newark each logged several thousand flight cancellations per year, placing both in the top tier of U.S. airports by number of canceled departures. In some recent years, FAA data lists Chicago and Newark alongside Denver, Dallas Fort Worth and LaGuardia as the U.S. hubs with the greatest absolute volume of cancellations.
Analyses by travel-insurance and data firms also support the picture of chronic strain. A long-running U.S. airport statistics resource tracking cancellation and delay percentages found that Newark recorded one of the highest cancellation rates among large American airports in 2023, while Chicago O’Hare posted a disruption rate near one in four flights. When compared with more punctual hubs, these differences amount to hundreds of thousands of additional passengers every year facing missed connections, rebookings or extended time on the ground.
Aviation analysts frequently point to a blend of infrastructure constraints, airspace congestion and weather exposure as key factors behind such performance. O’Hare sits at the heart of a dense Midwestern air traffic corridor and is vulnerable to summer thunderstorms and winter snow, while Newark operates within the tightly packed and delay-prone New York region. When combined with the heavy scheduling of hub-and-spoke connecting traffic, these structural challenges help explain why both airports appear so prominently in disruption rankings.
Weather Shocks Expose Vulnerabilities at Chicago and Newark
Major storm systems in recent years have highlighted how quickly operations at Chicago and Newark can become overwhelmed. During severe winter weather events affecting the Midwest and Northeast, flight-tracking tallies regularly show O’Hare and Newark among the U.S. airports with the highest single-day counts of cancellations and delays. In one widely reported storm period earlier this year, national media summaries of FlightAware data cited roughly 600 cancellations at O’Hare on a single day, with Newark and other East Coast hubs also experiencing substantial disruption.
Historical examples point in the same direction. Coverage of the December 2022 North American blizzard documented more than 820 flights canceled at Chicago’s two major airports over a short window, while ground delay programs at New York–area facilities, including Newark, compounded the impact for travelers across the network. Such events often reverberate for days, as aircraft and crews fall out of position and schedules require large-scale rebalancing.
Weather-sensitive disruption metrics used by AirHelp and other analytics firms consider both minor and severe events, capturing anything from modest departure delays to extended cancellations of whole waves of flights. For high-volume hubs such as O’Hare and Newark, this means that even localized thunderstorms or short-lived snow showers can appear prominently in monthly or annual data, because they affect large banks of departures and arrivals simultaneously.
While other global hubs face similar seasonal risks, the combination of Midwestern and Northeast climate patterns, dense airspace and heavy reliance on domestic connections has made Chicago and Newark especially visible in disruption tables. That visibility increases as more datasets are made public and as consumer-facing outlets translate raw operational statistics into airport “league tables.”
How Disruption at Two Hubs Ripples Across the World
The prominence of O’Hare and Newark in global disruption rankings carries implications far beyond the United States. Both airports function as major connecting points for transatlantic and transpacific traffic, and they serve as primary gateways for some of the world’s largest airline alliances. When departures stack up or cancellations mount in Chicago or Newark, international flights inbound from Europe, Asia and Latin America can face missed connections, crew timeouts and equipment rotation challenges.
Eurocontrol’s global departure overviews, which track the busiest airports worldwide by daily flight counts, frequently place O’Hare among the top ten airports globally by average movements. Newark, while smaller, still appears within the top 25 in some recent weekly snapshots. These rankings illustrate how disruption at these hubs can influence operational flows not only within North America but also across the Atlantic and into other regions.
For travelers, this has practical consequences. Travel media coverage of the 2025 AirHelp report has already encouraged passengers with tight connections to reconsider itineraries that pass through O’Hare or Newark during peak seasons, particularly in summer thunderstorm periods or over major holidays. Some routing guides suggest building in longer connection times or selecting alternative hubs when feasible, especially for long-haul journeys where a missed link can mean an unplanned overnight stay.
At the same time, industry observers note that both airports remain essential to airline network strategies. Their locations, local demand and alliance structures make them difficult to replace, even as disruption figures continue to draw scrutiny from passengers, regulators and airport planners around the world.
Efforts to Rein In Delays Face Structural Limits
In response to growing congestion and disruption, U.S. regulators and airport operators have periodically moved to cap or trim peak-hour schedules at the most delay-prone hubs. In past years, seasonal slot reductions and voluntary flight cuts at Newark were introduced to reduce pressure on air traffic control and runway capacity. Commentary from aviation experts suggests that similar capacity-management conversations are emerging at O’Hare, where summer schedules in particular risk pushing the airport close to its operational limits.
FAA performance publications show a modest improvement in total cancellations at core U.S. airports in fiscal 2024 compared with previous years, even as weather and demand pressures persisted. The same documents, however, continue to identify Chicago and Newark among the airports with the highest absolute numbers of cancellations, underscoring the scale of the challenge facing planners and airlines.
Infrastructure upgrades, including runway reconfigurations, terminal expansions and new technology for air traffic management, are intended to improve resilience over time. Yet analysts caution that demand growth can quickly absorb these gains, leaving airports still operating near capacity and vulnerable to any disruption. For global travelers planning itineraries through the United States, the emerging data signals that Chicago O’Hare and Newark Liberty will likely remain on the front line of flight disruption for the foreseeable future.
AirHelp 2025 USA Flight Disruption Report
Travel + Leisure coverage of U.S. airports with most disruptions