Carrier route record
NKCLE→FLL
Spirit Airlines · Cleveland to Fort Lauderdale
- Flights
- 185
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 14%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.
Spirit on CLE to FLL draws a C−. About 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 185 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 551 at 89.9% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so Spirit on CLE to FLL runs 11 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 106 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
66.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 174 completed flights
Avg delay
76 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
5.95%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
81.9%
Every carrier on CLE to FLL, 1,305 flights
These figures cover 185 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 16.1% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
Spirit against every carrier on CLE to FLL
Spirit flew 185 of the 1,305 flights on CLE to FLL, about 14% of it. Its 66.7% on time is 15 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 81.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number four of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from JetBlue at 97.9% to Southwest at 0.0%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. United Airlines arrives on time 89.9% of the time; Frontier Airlines manages 77.1%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 514 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JetBlue Airwaysthin sample | 54 | 97.9% | 22 min | 11.11% | A− |
| United Airlines | 551 | 89.9% | 70 min | 0.73% | A+ |
| Frontier Airlines | 514 | 77.1% | 87 min | 2.72% | B |
| Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample | 185 | 66.7% | 76 min | 5.95% | C− |
| Southwest Airlinesthin sample | 1 | 0.0% | 124 min | 0.00% | F+ |
The spread between United and Frontier is 13 points, wide enough that it should decide the booking. On a hundred trips that is 13 more arrivals inside the on-time window.
Timetable by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.
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 185 flights.
- 5am–8am17 flights—
- 8am–11am—
- 11am–2pm36 flights67.6%
- 2pm–5pm5 flights—
- 5pm–8pm95 flights59.1%
- 8pm–5am32 flights67.7%
Scale runs 50% to 75%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 59.1% on time, against 67.7% for the 8pm–5am 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 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 95 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Spirit on CLE to FLL through the year
- Jul–Sep 202522 flights—
- Oct–Dec 202572 flights74.3%
- Jan–Mar 202679 flights62.5%
- Apr–Jun 202612 flights—
Scale runs 55% to 80%. 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 66.7% on time across 185 flights.
Split by quarter, Spirit on CLE to FLL logged 22 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 72 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 79 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 66.7% annual figure is the one to use.
Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 74.2% on time and Thursday the weakest at 63.3%, a spread of 11 points.
Arrival by arrival
How late Spirit on CLE to FLL runs when it is late
Spirit on CLE to FLL often beats the schedule: 62 of 174 completed flights, 36%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 58 late arrivals split 14 under half an hour, 16 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 28 an hour or more.
- 15+ min early62 flights35.6%
- Within 15 min54 flights31.0%
- 15–29 min late14 flights8.0%
- 30–59 min late16 flights9.2%
- 1–2 hours late19 flights10.9%
- 2+ hours late9 flights5.2%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 174 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
10 of 59 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 17% of them. In the other direction, 9 flights left on time yet arrived 15 minutes late or more, so that delay built up after pushback: in the air, in a holding pattern or on the ground at FLL.
The worst days
Worst days for Spirit on CLE to FLL
The latest arrival of the period was on 6 February 2026, 4 hours 51 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. The same cause led on four of the five worst days.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 6 February 2026 | 4 hours 51 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 2 February 2026 | 3 hours 52 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 21 September 2025 | 3 hours 27 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 26 December 2025 | 3 hours 2 minutes | National Airspace System |
| 19 March 2026 | 2 hours 49 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
Delay causes
Why Spirit runs late on this route
Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 53% of the 4,430 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 53%Late-arriving aircraft
- 35%National Airspace System
- 10%Carrier
- 2%Extreme weather
53% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 4,430 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 29 to one. The split is drawn from 4,430 reported delay minutes.
35% 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 1,544 minutes out of 4,430, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations run at 5.95%, against 1.89% 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
16.1% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
The 1,062 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.
The return leg runs 63.8% on time across 186 flights, within 3 points of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 185 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 CLE to FLL
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 5.95% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; 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. 174 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- CLE to FLL, every carrier
- Spirit on FLL to CLE, the return leg
- United Airlines on CLE to FLL89.9%
- Frontier Airlines on CLE to FLL77.1%
- Spirit Airlines network-wide record
- Cleveland Hopkins International (CLE) delay statistics
- Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.