Carrier route record
NKBOS→MCO
Spirit Airlines · Boston to Orlando
- Flights
- 515
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 11%
- Carriers
- 6
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.
Spirit on BOS to MCO draws a D−. Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 515 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 1,257 at 75.4% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Spirit on BOS to MCO runs 14 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 141 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
63.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 493 completed flights
Avg delay
80 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
4.08%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
70.1%
Every carrier on BOS to MCO, 4,606 flights
These figures cover 515 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 16.6% 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 BOS to MCO
Spirit flew 515 of the 4,606 flights on BOS to MCO, about 11% of it. Its 63.5% on time is 7 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 70.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number five of six carriers on the route, where the range runs from American at 79.2% to Southwest at 50.0%. Three 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 75.4% of the time; JetBlue Airways manages 67.9%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 2,493 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| American Airlinesthin sample | 213 | 79.2% | 105 min | 2.82% | B |
| Delta Air Lines | 1,257 | 75.4% | 80 min | 2.15% | B |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 124 | 69.9% | 66 min | 0.00% | C+ |
| JetBlue Airways | 2,493 | 67.9% | 73 min | 2.89% | C |
| Spirit Airlines (this page) | 515 | 63.5% | 80 min | 4.08% | D− |
| Southwest Airlinesthin sample | 4 | 50.0% | 19 min | 0.00% | F+ |
Delta leads JetBlue by 8 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 33 points, against 8 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am70 flights86.4%
- 8am–11am67 flights53.1%
- 11am–2pm114 flights64.9%
- 2pm–5pm184 flights57.1%
- 5pm–8pm37 flights62.9%
- 8pm–5am43 flights66.7%
Scale runs 45% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 86.4% of the time, against 53.1% for the morning window. That is 33 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 184 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Spirit on BOS to MCO through the year
Delays peak in March, when the on-time rate falls to 31.6%. August is the strongest month at 84.8%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 53 points. February was the busiest month here, with 67 flights.
Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 75.0% on time and Sunday the weakest at 49.3%. 26 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 14,000 reported delay minutes.
- 37%National Airspace System
- 35%Carrier
- 26%Late-arriving aircraft
- 2%Extreme weather
- 1%Security
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 5,029 of the 14,000 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 14,421 reported delay minutes.
37% 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 5,305 minutes out of 14,000, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations run at 4.08%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about 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. 16.6% 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 1,121 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 69.3% on time across 519 flights, 6 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 6 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 515 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 BOS to MCO
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.08% 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. 493 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- BOS to MCO, every carrier
- Spirit on MCO to BOS, the return leg
- American Airlines on BOS to MCO79.2%
- Delta Air Lines on BOS to MCO75.4%
- Frontier Airlines on BOS to MCO69.9%
- JetBlue Airways on BOS to MCO67.9%
- Spirit Airlines network-wide record
- Boston Logan International (BOS) delay statistics
- Orlando International (MCO) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- 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.