O’Hare Flight Delays Stretch Into a Third Day, With Some Waits Nearing 10 Hours

Chicago O’Hare International Airport is working through its third straight day of storm-driven disruption. By Tuesday afternoon, Aug. 11, 2026, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration)’s own air-traffic status system showed an active ground delay program at O’Hare — spacing out arrivals rather than stopping them outright — with delays averaging 1 hour 45 minutes and the longest waits nearing 10 hours, time added before a flight leaves the ground rather than spent already aboard one, as a fresh line of severe thunderstorms crossed the Chicago area.

It is the latest round in a stretch that began Sunday, Aug. 9, when an earlier storm system triggered a ground stop — a temporary halt on flights headed to O’Hare — lasting more than three hours and left the airport with 1,312 delayed flights and 272 cancellations for the day, according to FlightAware-based tracking data. Midway Airport, a few miles south, logged at least 91 cancellations of its own that day, with average delays of nearly 45 minutes. Disruption continued into Monday — reports on that day’s totals conflict with each other and none could be confirmed here — before a new, separate severe storm system rolled through Tuesday morning and midday, bringing a tornado warning, damaging winds and another round of ground stops.

Key facts

• Third straight day of storm-driven disruption at O’Hare as of Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026.
• Tuesday’s ground delay program: delays averaging 1 hour 45 minutes, longest waits nearing 10 hours.
• Sunday, Aug. 9: a ground stop lasting more than three hours left O’Hare with 1,312 delayed flights and 272 cancellations; Midway logged at least 91 cancellations.
• Tuesday’s storm produced wind gusts as high as 99 mph at Gary/Chicago International Airport; the National Weather Service confirmed a tornado on radar over Flossmoor and Homewood, though the National Weather Service has since surveyed the storm and rated tornadoes from the event EF-0 to EF-2, and officially classified the wider system as a derecho — the region’s first in six years. The storm system has since been confirmed to have caused at least two deaths in Indiana, including a house-explosion victim identified as Leona Rice and a 4-year-old killed when a tree fell on a home in Jennings County.
• ComEd reported more than 357,000 customers without power at the peak in northern Illinois; Nipsco reported more than 289,000 outages in northwestern Indiana.
• United Airlines absorbed about 52 cancellations Sunday, compared with fewer than a dozen for American Airlines.
• The FAA has capped O’Hare at 2,708 scheduled flights a day, a limit extended through October 2027.

Timeline

• Sunday, Aug. 9 — Ground stop lasting more than three hours; O’Hare ends the day with 1,312 delayed flights and 272 cancellations, Midway with at least 91 cancellations.
• Monday, Aug. 10 — Disruption continues; reports on the day’s totals conflict with each other and none could be confirmed.
• Tuesday morning, Aug. 11 — O’Hare recovers to a 94.2% on-time rate, with just 145 delayed flights and 19 cancellations.
• Tuesday midday, Aug. 11 — A new storm system arrives; cancellations climb to roughly 250 by 11:30 a.m. and nearly 300 by the afternoon.
• Tuesday afternoon, Aug. 11 — An active ground delay program is in place, with delays averaging 1 hour 45 minutes and the longest waits nearing 10 hours, set to continue until 10 p.m.

Tuesday’s storm hit hard

Tuesday’s system produced wind gusts as high as 99 mph at Gary/Chicago International Airport in northwest Indiana. The National Weather Service confirmed a tornado on radar over Flossmoor and Homewood at 10:53 a.m. and tracked it east into northwest Indiana. As of Tuesday evening it had not published the ground survey that assigns a strength rating, so the tornado had no rating yet.

The morning had actually brought some relief. By mid-morning, O’Hare was running a 94.2% on-time rate, with just 145 delayed flights and 19 cancellations out of roughly 2,550 arrivals and departures over the previous 24 hours, as the airport worked through the weekend’s backlog. That recovery didn’t last. Once the new storm system arrived around midday, cancellations climbed quickly — to roughly 250 by 11:30 a.m., and to nearly 300 by the afternoon, according to the airport’s own website, as cited by the Chicago Sun-Times. The ground delay program was in place and set to continue until 10 p.m. Tuesday. Midway Airport, a few miles south, saw far less disruption — only a handful of cancellations — though the Chicago Department of Aviation said it was Midway’s control tower, not O’Hare’s, that was briefly evacuated during the storms.

Which airline got hit hardest

United Airlines absorbed most of Sunday’s cancellations — about 52, compared with fewer than a dozen for American Airlines. Delay counts for the two carriers circulated as well, at roughly 1,055 for United and 1,053 for American, but those two figures together come to more than the 1,312 delays the airport recorded across the whole day, and each version of them traces back to the same single report. This article does not rely on them. Neither airline has released carrier-by-carrier cancellation counts for Monday or Tuesday, so it isn’t possible to say here which carrier took the heaviest hit as the week wore on.

Power outages spread well beyond the airport

The storms also knocked out power well beyond the airport. ComEd reported more than 357,000 customers without electricity in northern Illinois at the peak, easing to about 250,000 by 3:30 p.m. as crews made repairs, while more than 289,000 Nipsco customers in northwestern Indiana also lost power. Those figures cover homes and businesses served by the two utilities — nobody has said whether O’Hare’s own terminals lost power at any point.

What travelers can do

The available reporting does not establish when disruptions will fully clear, and Tuesday’s pattern — a morning recovery undone by a fresh storm within hours — shows how quickly conditions can shift. Travelers flying through O’Hare or Midway should check the FAA’s National Airspace System status page or the Chicago Department of Aviation’s O’Hare delay information for the latest ground stops and ground delay programs, track their specific flight through their airline or a tracker like FlightAware, and contact their airline directly for the latest on rebooking options before heading to the airport.

A separate fight over O’Hare’s flight cap

Even before this week’s storms, O’Hare had less operational slack than usual. Since mid-2026, the FAA has limited the airport to 2,708 scheduled flights a day — about 10% below what airlines had planned for the summer — citing strain on runways, terminals and air-traffic control from ongoing construction. In July, the FAA extended that cap through October 2027, a year beyond its original end date. United Airlines has said it postponed launching 11 new O’Hare routes in response to the extension. Illinois Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth wrote to the Transportation Secretary and the FAA administrator questioning the extension. This cap dispute predates this week’s storms, and nothing in current reporting ties it to the weather-driven delays described above.

Sources and further reading

• Trumps Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy Takes Action to Prevent Endless Delays, Cancellations at Chicago O’Hare
• Operating Limitations at Chicago O’Hare International Airport – Order Extension W26/27 and S27 (PDF)
• Operating Limitations at Chicago O’Hare International Airport (extension)
• National Airspace System Status (live status list)
• federalregister.gov
• Operating Limitations at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, Notice of Meeting and Request for Information (docket FAA-2004-16944)
• National Airspace System airport status information (live feed)