Carrier route record

NKBWI→MSY

Spirit Airlines · Baltimore to New Orleans

Flights: 131
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 11%
Carriers: 3

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

Spirit on BWI to MSY earns a B. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 7 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs an hour and a half. That rests on 131 flights, with a median arrival 12 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, Spirit's BWI to MSY record is 7 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 69 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

84.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 129 completed flights

Avg delay

95 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.53%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

77.4%

Every carrier on BWI to MSY, 1,180 flights

These figures cover 131 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.3% 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 BWI to MSY

Spirit flew 131 of the 1,180 flights on BWI to MSY, about 11% of it. Its 84.5% on time is 7 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 77.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Spirit at 84.5% to Frontier at 66.7%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.

On-time performance by carrier on BWI to MSY
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample	131	84.5%	95 min	1.53%	B
Southwest Airlines	1,031	76.7%	57 min	1.16%	B
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	18	66.7%	68 min	0.00%	C+

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 131 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Spirit's BWI to MSY record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 84.5% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Spirit on BWI to MSY through the year

Jul–Sep 202563 flights83.6%
Oct–Dec 202564 flights89.1%
Jan–Mar 20264 flights—

Scale runs 75% to 95%. 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 84.5% on time across 131 flights.

Split by quarter, Spirit on BWI to MSY logged 63 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 64 flights in Oct–Dec 2025 and 4 flights in Jan–Mar 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 84.5% 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 1,902 reported delay minutes.

National Airspace System
37%
Carrier
33%
Late-arriving aircraft
30%

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 700 minutes out of 1,902, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 1,902 reported delay minutes.

The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 96.1% on time here.

Cancellations sit at 1.53% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.

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. 9.3% 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 998 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 80.2% on time across 132 flights, 4 points below 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 4 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 131 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 BWI to MSY

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 131 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 84.5% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 129 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