Carrier route record
WNBWI→MCO
Southwest Airlines · Baltimore to Orlando
- Flights
- 3,581
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 76%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on BWI to MCO lands a B, level with the national rate of 77.6%. Roughly one flight in four arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 3,581 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Frontier Airlines, flew 539 at 73.1% on time.
The US average over the same twelve months is 77.6%, so there is little to separate Southwest on BWI 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
76.9%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 3,496 completed flights
Avg delay
64 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.98%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
75.6%
Every carrier on BWI to MCO, 4,713 flights
These figures cover 3,581 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 4 minutes early, which is the part an average hides: most flights here are fine, and the on-time rate is decided by a tail of badly late ones. On-time means under 15 minutes late, the DOT's own threshold.
Carrier by carrier
Southwest against every carrier on BWI to MCO
Southwest flew 3,581 of the 4,713 flights on BWI to MCO, most of the route. Its 76.9% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 75.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 76.9% to Spirit at 70.2%.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlines (this page) | 3,581 | 76.9% | 64 min | 1.98% | B |
| Frontier Airlines | 539 | 73.1% | 93 min | 2.60% | C |
| Spirit Airlines | 593 | 70.2% | 74 min | 3.04% | C− |
Spirit Airlines cancels 3.0% 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 29 points, against 3 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am451 flights91.5%
- 8am–11am908 flights85.6%
- 11am–2pm572 flights77.9%
- 2pm–5pm654 flights71.8%
- 5pm–8pm678 flights63.0%
- 8pm–5am318 flights69.0%
Scale runs 55% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 63.0% on time, against 91.5% 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 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 908 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on BWI to MCO through the year
July is the worst month at 63.3% on time, 24 points below September, the best at 87.0%. 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. May was the busiest month here, with 329 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 82.1% on time and Sunday the weakest at 69.2%. 13 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 52,000 reported delay minutes.
- 34%National Airspace System
- 32%Carrier
- 28%Late-arriving aircraft
- 6%Extreme weather
- 1%Security
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 18,000 minutes out of 52,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 51,688 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations sit at 1.98% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.39%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
7.8% 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.
The 787 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 runs 76.8% on time across 3,584 flights, within half a point of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
The sample behind these figures is 3,581 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 BWI to MCO
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. September runs 87.0% on time and July 63.3%, a swing of 24 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of July before you think about anything else. 3,496 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- BWI to MCO, every carrier
- Southwest on MCO to BWI, the return leg
- Frontier Airlines on BWI to MCO73.1%
- Spirit Airlines on BWI to MCO70.2%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall (BWI) delay statistics
- Orlando International (MCO) delay statistics
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
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.