This is one of the more delayed long-haul SAS flights there is, so that helps. [I won’t publicly mention how much money SAS owes me for delays from just this quarter for my trips using CPH-ORD. ]

You will have to clear exit passport control at CPH, and that can gum up things. But if you have checked in luggage tagged in Rome for Rome-CPH-ORD — even a useless bag of newspapers, magazines, brochures, etc. — that can buy you some extra time for making the flight given the hassle of offloading luggage.

If you’re doing a C gate departure for CPH-ORD, do the C gate passport control by going to the left most All Passports lane unless you notice from the start that the right most All Passports lane is completely empty or nearly empty. The dynamic for the passport control closest to E gates for CPH-ORD is not like that closest for passport control to the C gates for CPH-ORD.

I am not sure SAS really sticks to the 35 minutes thing for those who have boarding passes in hand already for CPH-ORD —- and they definitely don’t stick to that for my E gate departures to ORD. For C gate departures to ORD, maybe they are bit more of a stickler with the time, but they have seemed reasonably flexible there too as I’m sure I am sometimes not showing up at the C gates until around 26-30 minutes before departure for some of my CPH-ORD flights.