Carrier route record
WNAUS→FLL
Southwest Airlines · Austin to Fort Lauderdale
- Flights
- 372
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 33%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on AUS to FLL draws a D+. Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is roughly 45 minutes behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 372 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, JetBlue Airways, flew 369 at 71.0% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Southwest on AUS to FLL runs 15 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 148 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
62.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 368 completed flights
Avg delay
47 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.54%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
67.2%
Every carrier on AUS to FLL, 1,116 flights
These figures cover 372 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. On-time means an arrival less than 15 minutes after the scheduled gate time, the same threshold the Department of Transportation uses in its own reports. Cancelled and diverted flights are excluded from the on-time rate and counted separately, which is why the cancellation column matters on its own.
Carrier by carrier
Southwest against every carrier on AUS to FLL
Southwest flew 372 of the 1,116 flights on AUS to FLL, about 33% of it. Its 62.8% on time is 4 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 67.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from JetBlue at 71.0% to Southwest at 62.8%.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 3 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JetBlue Airways | 369 | 71.0% | 77 min | 0.81% | C+ |
| Spirit Airlines | 375 | 68.1% | 65 min | 5.33% | C− |
| Southwest Airlines (this page) | 372 | 62.8% | 47 min | 0.54% | D+ |
Spirit Airlines cancels 5.3% 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 52 points, against 3 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am23 flights—
- 8am–11am63 flights82.3%
- 11am–2pm101 flights88.9%
- 2pm–5pm103 flights37.3%
- 5pm–8pm55 flights47.3%
- 8pm–5am27 flights—
Scale runs 30% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The best window here is not the first bank but the 11am–2pm slot at 88.9% on time, ahead of 2pm–5pm at 37.3%. Where the curve peaks mid-day rather than at dawn, the constraint is usually congestion at one end rather than the aircraft's own rotation. The 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 103 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on AUS to FLL through the year
June is the worst month at 43.3% on time, 42 points below January, the best at 85.3%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. December was the busiest month here, with 38 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 81.2% on time and Friday the weakest at 45.3%. 36 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Southwest runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 52% of the 6,487 delay minutes carriers reported, and the remaining four split what is left. The split is by minutes rather than by flights, so a few very long delays count for as much as many short ones.
- 52%Late-arriving aircraft
- 37%Carrier
- 11%National Airspace System
- 1%Security
52% 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 6,487 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 52 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 6,487 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 37%, 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 2,376 of the 6,487 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.54%, 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
7.6% 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 roughly 45 minutes, which a normal layover absorbs.
The 1,105 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 73.0% on time across 372 flights, 10 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 10 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 372 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 Southwest on AUS to FLL
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 372 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 62.8% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 368 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- AUS to FLL, every carrier
- Southwest on FLL to AUS, the return leg
- JetBlue Airways on AUS to FLL71.0%
- Spirit Airlines on AUS to FLL68.1%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Austin-Bergstrom International (AUS) delay statistics
- Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL) 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.