Carrier route record

WNDTW→MCO

Southwest Airlines · Detroit to Orlando

Flights: 127
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 3%
Carriers: 4

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

Southwest on DTW to MCO sits in the middle of the pack with a C+. About seven flights in ten arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 9 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. The late ones land about an hour behind schedule. That rests on 127 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Spirit Airlines, flew 956 at 78.4% on time.

Spirit Airlines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 78.4% on time across 956 flights.

On time

69.0%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 126 completed flights

Avg delay

56 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.00%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

75.6%

Every carrier on DTW to MCO, 3,680 flights

These figures cover 127 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.5% 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

Southwest against every carrier on DTW to MCO

Southwest flew 127 of the 3,680 flights on DTW to MCO, about 3% of it. Its 69.0% on time is 7 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 75.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Spirit at 78.4% to Southwest at 69.0%.

The three carriers here are closely matched: 4 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.

On-time performance by carrier on DTW to MCO
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Spirit Airlines	956	78.4%	65 min	0.94%	B+
Frontier Airlines	427	76.1%	103 min	1.41%	B
Delta Air Lines	2,170	74.6%	71 min	0.92%	C+
Southwest Airlines (this page)thin sample	127	69.0%	56 min	0.00%	C+

No carrier stands out. Spirit tops the table at 78.4%, 4 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.

Departure window

When Southwest 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 127 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Southwest's DTW to MCO record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 69.0% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Southwest on DTW to MCO through the year

Jul–Sep 202510 flights—
Oct–Dec 202549 flights67.3%
Jan–Mar 202656 flights63.6%
Apr–Jun 202612 flights—

Scale runs 55% to 75%. 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 69.0% on time across 127 flights.

Split by quarter, Southwest on DTW to MCO logged 10 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 49 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 56 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 69.0% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why Southwest runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 46% of the 2,181 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.

Late-arriving aircraft
46%
National Airspace System
31%
Carrier
23%
Extreme weather
0%

46% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. That is a cascade, and cascades start small and grow through the day. Across 2,181 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 46 to one. It is the strongest argument for booking the first departure of the morning, when the aircraft has been sitting at the gate overnight with nothing to inherit. The split is drawn from 2,181 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

For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 9.5% 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 957 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 55.1% on time across 128 flights, 14 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 14 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 127 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 Southwest on DTW to MCO

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 127 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 69.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 126 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