Carrier route record
NKDTW→BWI
Spirit Airlines · Detroit to Baltimore
- Flights
- 109
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 5%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.
Spirit on DTW to BWI lands a B+, 5 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by close to two hours on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 109 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 1,204 at 81.9% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Spirit's DTW to BWI record is 5 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 50 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
82.6%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 109 completed flights
Avg delay
103 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.00%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
80.9%
Every carrier on DTW to BWI, 2,261 flights
These figures cover 109 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 8.3% 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 DTW to BWI
Spirit flew 109 of the 2,261 flights on DTW to BWI, about 5% of it. Its 82.6% on time is 2 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 80.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 100.0% to Frontier at 76.9%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 2 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Republic Airwaysthin sample | 14 | 100.0% | — | 7.14% | A− |
| Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample | 109 | 82.6% | 103 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| Delta Air Lines | 1,204 | 81.9% | 73 min | 1.50% | B |
| Southwest Airlines | 784 | 79.6% | 48 min | 1.02% | B |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 150 | 76.9% | 66 min | 2.00% | B |
No carrier stands out. Delta tops the table at 81.9%, 2 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
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 109 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Spirit's DTW to BWI record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 82.6% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
Spirit on DTW to BWI through the year
- Jul–Sep 202579 flights81.0%
- Oct–Dec 202530 flights86.7%
Scale runs 75% to 90%. 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 82.6% on time across 109 flights.
Split by quarter, Spirit on DTW to BWI logged 79 flights in Jul–Sep 2025 and 30 flights in Oct–Dec 2025. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 82.6% annual figure is the one to use.
Delay causes
Why Spirit runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 63% of the 1,962 delay minutes carriers reported, and the remaining four split what is left. The split is by minutes rather than by flights, so a few very long delays count for as much as many short ones.
- 63%Carrier
- 21%National Airspace System
- 16%Late-arriving aircraft
The largest share of delay minutes, 63%, 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 1,240 of the 1,962 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 1,962 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations are rare at 0.00%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Almost no flights are called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
8.3% 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 close to two hours, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 409 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 8pm–5am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 77.1% on time across 106 flights, 6 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 6 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 109 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 DTW to BWI
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 109 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 82.6% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 109 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DTW to BWI, every carrier
- Spirit on BWI to DTW, the return leg
- Delta Air Lines on DTW to BWI81.9%
- Southwest Airlines on DTW to BWI79.6%
- Frontier Airlines on DTW to BWI76.9%
- Spirit Airlines network-wide record
- Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County (DTW) delay statistics
- Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall (BWI) delay statistics
- Connecting flights: how much buffer the data says you need
- How to read this site: grades, sample sizes, and honest caveats
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.