Carrier route record
WNATL→MCO
Southwest Airlines · Atlanta to Orlando
- Flights
- 1,095
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 13%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on ATL to MCO sits in the middle of the pack with a B. Close to three flights in four arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 2 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. The late ones land about an hour behind schedule. That rests on 1,095 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Spirit Airlines, flew 470 at 71.5% on time.
The US average over the same twelve months is 77.6%, so there is little to separate Southwest on ATL to MCO from the country as a whole. The variation that matters here is internal: which carrier, and what time of day.
Key figures
On time
75.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,079 completed flights
Avg delay
61 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.10%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
70.7%
Every carrier on ATL to MCO, 8,211 flights
These figures cover 1,095 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 8.4% 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
Southwest against every carrier on ATL to MCO
Southwest flew 1,095 of the 8,211 flights on ATL to MCO, about 13% of it. Its 75.4% on time is 5 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 70.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 75.4% to Frontier at 65.6%.
The three carriers here are closely matched: 6 points separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlines (this page) | 1,095 | 75.4% | 61 min | 1.10% | B |
| Spirit Airlines | 470 | 71.5% | 89 min | 3.62% | C− |
| Delta Air Lines | 5,465 | 70.7% | 64 min | 1.17% | C |
| Frontier Airlines | 1,181 | 65.6% | 112 min | 1.61% | C |
Spirit Airlines cancels 3.6% of what it schedules here, the highest in the table. A cancelled flight never appears in an on-time rate, so read that column alongside the punctuality one rather than after it.
Departure window
When Southwest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 40 points, against 6 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am106 flights94.3%
- 8am–11am274 flights89.0%
- 11am–2pm313 flights83.2%
- 2pm–5pm67 flights59.4%
- 5pm–8pm321 flights54.6%
- 8pm–5am14 flights—
Scale runs 45% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 54.6% on time, against 94.3% 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 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 321 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on ATL to MCO through the year
Delays peak in March, when the on-time rate falls to 60.4%. January is the strongest month at 92.1%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 32 points. October was the busiest month here, with 94 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 85.5% on time and Thursday the weakest at 68.6%. 17 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Southwest 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 16,000 reported delay minutes.
- 36%Late-arriving aircraft
- 34%National Airspace System
- 26%Carrier
- 4%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
36% 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 16,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 9 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 16,158 reported delay minutes.
34% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 5,495 minutes out of 16,000, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations sit at 1.10% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.37%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
8.4% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last about an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 404 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 71.3% on time across 1,093 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,095 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 Southwest on ATL to MCO
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. January runs 92.1% on time and March 60.4%, a swing of 32 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of March before you think about anything else. 1,079 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ATL to MCO, every carrier
- Southwest on MCO to ATL, the return leg
- Spirit Airlines on ATL to MCO71.5%
- Delta Air Lines on ATL to MCO70.7%
- Frontier Airlines on ATL to MCO65.6%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL) delay statistics
- Orlando International (MCO) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.