Carrier route record
NKATL→FLL
Spirit Airlines · Atlanta to Fort Lauderdale
- Flights
- 1,341
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 19%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.
Spirit on ATL to FLL carries a cancellation problem, not just a delay problem: 3.6% of scheduled flights never operate, against 1.8% nationally. Of the ones that do fly, about two flights in three arrive on time, worth a C− overall. The punctuality figure counts only flights that actually departed, so it flatters an operation that cancels this often. That rests on 1,341 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 4,272 at 73.5% on time.
Delta Air Lines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 73.5% on time across 4,272 flights.
Key figures
On time
66.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,289 completed flights
Avg delay
69 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.65%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
70.7%
Every carrier on ATL to FLL, 7,189 flights
These figures cover 1,341 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 14.0% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.
Carrier by carrier
Spirit against every carrier on ATL to FLL
Spirit flew 1,341 of the 7,189 flights on ATL to FLL, about 19% of it. Its 66.0% on time is 5 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 70.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number four of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 100.0% to Frontier at 64.2%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Delta Air Lines arrives on time 73.5% of the time; Frontier Airlines manages 64.2%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 928 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlinesthin sample | 1 | 100.0% | — | 0.00% | A+ |
| Delta Air Lines | 4,272 | 73.5% | 55 min | 1.57% | C |
| JetBlue Airways | 647 | 70.2% | 80 min | 2.47% | C |
| Spirit Airlines (this page) | 1,341 | 66.0% | 69 min | 3.65% | C− |
| Frontier Airlines | 928 | 64.2% | 80 min | 2.37% | D |
Delta leads Frontier by 9 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.
Departure window
When Spirit runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 22 points, against 9 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am305 flights80.0%
- 8am–11am276 flights64.3%
- 11am–2pm161 flights65.6%
- 2pm–5pm156 flights65.4%
- 5pm–8pm186 flights58.7%
- 8pm–5am257 flights57.8%
Scale runs 50% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 57.8% on time, against 80.0% for the 5am–8am slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 305 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Spirit on ATL to FLL through the year
September is the best month on the calendar at 84.7% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. March was the busiest month here, with 154 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 79.3% on time and Sunday the weakest at 54.5%. 25 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Spirit runs late on this route
Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 30,000 reported delay minutes.
- 39%Late-arriving aircraft
- 30%National Airspace System
- 30%Carrier
- 1%Security
- 1%Extreme weather
39% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. That is a cascade, and cascades start small and grow through the day. Across 30,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 39 to one. It is the strongest argument for booking the first departure of the morning, when the aircraft has been sitting at the gate overnight with nothing to inherit. The split is drawn from 30,234 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 80.0% on time here.
Cancellations run at 3.65%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly one flight in 25 cancelled outright. A cancelled flight is invisible in every on-time figure on this page, so the punctuality numbers above describe only the flights that actually operated.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 14.0% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
The 581 miles between these two airports put this in the middle of the US network, around two and a half to three hours of block time. That is enough cruise to absorb a ten-minute late pushback and not enough to absorb thirty. It is also long enough that the aircraft usually flies three or four legs a day rather than six, which slows how fast delay compounds.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 60.7% on time across 1,343 flights, 5 points below this direction. Departure banks, aircraft rotations and the congestion at each end all differ, so scoring the two directions together would average away a real 5 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,341 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.
What to do with this
Booking Spirit on ATL to FLL
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.65% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 5am–8am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 1,289 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ATL to FLL, every carrier
- Spirit on FLL to ATL, the return leg
- Delta Air Lines on ATL to FLL73.5%
- JetBlue Airways on ATL to FLL70.2%
- Frontier Airlines on ATL to FLL64.2%
- Spirit Airlines network-wide record
- Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL) delay statistics
- Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, July 2025 to June 2026. Last updated 15 September 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.