Carrier route record

NKAUS→MCO

Spirit Airlines · Austin to Orlando

Flights: 189
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 7%
Carriers: 4

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.

Spirit on AUS to MCO draws a D−. Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is an hour and a half behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 189 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 547 at 81.1% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Spirit on AUS to MCO runs 15 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 147 extra late arrivals.

On time

62.9%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 178 completed flights

Avg delay

99 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

5.82%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

72.9%

Every carrier on AUS to MCO, 2,792 flights

These figures cover 189 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 19.1% 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 AUS to MCO

Spirit flew 189 of the 2,792 flights on AUS to MCO, about 7% of it. Its 62.9% on time is 10 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 72.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 81.1% to Spirit at 62.9%. 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 81.1% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 71.1%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,885 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on AUS to MCO
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Delta Air Lines	547	81.1%	61 min	1.46%	B
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	171	77.1%	71 min	2.92%	B
Southwest Airlines	1,885	71.1%	57 min	0.95%	C+
Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample	189	62.9%	99 min	5.82%	D−

Delta leads Southwest by 10 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 is the single lever a traveller controls, and it moves the odds more than most people expect. Each bar below is the on-time rate for flights scheduled to leave inside that window, across 189 flights.

5am–8am29 flights—
8am–11am12 flights—
11am–2pm9 flights—
2pm–5pm9 flights—
5pm–8pm92 flights56.0%
8pm–5am38 flights61.1%

Scale runs 50% to 65%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 8pm–5am window is the strongest at 61.1% on time. The full set of windows spans 5 points.

Across the year

Spirit on AUS to MCO through the year

Jul–Sep 202521 flights—
Oct–Dec 202566 flights67.7%
Jan–Mar 202690 flights63.4%
Apr–Jun 202612 flights—

Scale runs 55% to 75%. 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 62.9% on time across 189 flights.

Split by quarter, Spirit on AUS to MCO logged 21 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 66 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 90 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 12 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 62.9% annual figure is the one to use.

Across the week, Friday is the strongest day at 67.7% on time and Monday the weakest at 48.4%. 19 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 6,529 reported delay minutes.

Late-arriving aircraft
36%
Carrier
35%
National Airspace System
29%
Security
0%

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 6,529 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 36 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 6,529 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 2,253 of the 6,529 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations run at 5.82%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly one flight in fifteen 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. 19.1% 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 994 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 72.1% on time across 189 flights, 9 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 9 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 189 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 AUS to MCO

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 5.82% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 8pm–5am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 178 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

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.

Key figures