Carrier route record
NKATL→TPA
Spirit Airlines · Atlanta to Tampa
- Flights
- 126
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 2%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.
Spirit on ATL to TPA sits in the middle of the pack with a C+. About seven flights in ten arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 8 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. The late ones land a little over an hour behind schedule. That rests on 126 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Southwest Airlines, flew 732 at 75.9% on time.
Southwest Airlines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 75.9% on time across 732 flights.
Key figures
On time
69.6%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 125 completed flights
Avg delay
82 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.79%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
73.3%
Every carrier on ATL to TPA, 6,141 flights
These figures cover 126 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 15.2% 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 TPA
Spirit flew 126 of the 6,141 flights on ATL to TPA, about 2% of it. Its 69.6% on time is 4 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 73.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 75.9% to Frontier at 64.9%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Southwest Airlines arrives on time 75.9% of the time; Frontier Airlines manages 64.9%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 870 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlines | 732 | 75.9% | 68 min | 0.82% | B+ |
| Delta Air Lines | 4,413 | 74.6% | 55 min | 1.18% | C |
| Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample | 126 | 69.6% | 82 min | 0.79% | C+ |
| Frontier Airlines | 870 | 64.9% | 77 min | 1.84% | D |
Southwest leads Frontier by 11 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 40 points, against 11 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am53 flights86.8%
- 11am–2pm1 flights—
- 2pm–5pm18 flights—
- 5pm–8pm2 flights—
- 8pm–5am52 flights47.1%
Scale runs 40% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 47.1% on time, against 86.8% for the 8am–11am 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 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 53 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Spirit on ATL to TPA through the year
- Jul–Sep 202563 flights63.5%
- Oct–Dec 202552 flights74.5%
- Apr–Jun 202611 flights—
Scale runs 55% to 80%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 69.6% on time across 126 flights.
Split by quarter, Spirit on ATL to TPA logged 63 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 52 flights in Oct–Dec 2025 and 11 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 69.6% annual figure is the one to use.
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 3,100 reported delay minutes.
- 35%Carrier
- 34%Late-arriving aircraft
- 24%National Airspace System
- 4%Security
- 3%Extreme weather
34% 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 3,100 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 11 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 3,100 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 35%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 1,070 of the 3,100 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.79%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Roughly one flight in 100 is called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.
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. 15.2% 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.
At 406 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 8am–11am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 80.2% on time across 126 flights, 11 points above 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 11 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 126 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor but not enough to pin the rate down tightly, and a single bad week moves it by more than a point. Treat the grade as a rough reading.
What to do with this
Booking Spirit on ATL to TPA
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 126 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 69.6% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 125 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ATL to TPA, every carrier
- Spirit on TPA to ATL, the return leg
- Southwest Airlines on ATL to TPA75.9%
- Delta Air Lines on ATL to TPA74.6%
- Frontier Airlines on ATL to TPA64.9%
- Spirit Airlines network-wide record
- Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL) delay statistics
- Tampa International (TPA) delay statistics
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
- 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.