Carrier route record
WNFLL→CMH
Southwest Airlines · Fort Lauderdale to Columbus
- Flights
- 385
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 46%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on FLL to CMH draws a D. Roughly one flight in two arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is roughly 50 minutes behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 385 flights, with a median arrival 7 minutes late.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Southwest on FLL to CMH runs 20 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 196 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
58.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 379 completed flights
Avg delay
52 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.30%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
64.7%
Every carrier on FLL to CMH, 837 flights
These figures cover 385 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 10.3% 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
Southwest against every carrier on FLL to CMH
Southwest flew 385 of the 837 flights on FLL to CMH, about 46% of it. Its 58.0% on time is 7 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 64.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Spirit at 72.0% to Frontier at 38.9%. 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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spirit Airlines | 432 | 72.0% | 62 min | 3.94% | C− |
| Southwest Airlines (this page) | 385 | 58.0% | 52 min | 1.30% | D |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 20 | 38.9% | 133 min | 10.00% | F− |
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 45 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am11 flights—
- 8am–11am36 flights88.9%
- 11am–2pm26 flights—
- 2pm–5pm151 flights60.9%
- 5pm–8pm97 flights45.2%
- 8pm–5am64 flights43.5%
Scale runs 35% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 43.5% on time, against 88.9% for the 8am–11am 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 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 151 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on FLL to CMH through the year
- Jul–Sep 202578 flights62.8%
- Oct–Dec 2025115 flights60.2%
- Jan–Mar 2026121 flights58.1%
- Apr–Jun 202671 flights49.3%
Scale runs 40% to 70%. 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 58.0% on time across 385 flights.
Southwest on FLL to CMH did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jul–Sep 2025 at 62.8% on time and its weakest Apr–Jun 2026 at 49.3%, a swing of 14 points on roughly 96 flights a quarter. The twelve-month rate averages over that, so if you are flying in a weak quarter the quarter's own figure is the better guide.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 79.4% on time and Monday the weakest at 43.4%. 36 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Southwest runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 58% of the 8,330 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.
- 58%Late-arriving aircraft
- 24%Carrier
- 15%National Airspace System
- 2%Security
- 1%Extreme weather
58% 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 8,330 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 50 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 8,330 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 88.9% on time here.
Cancellations sit at 1.30% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.26%.
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. 10.3% 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 973 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 77.5% on time across 386 flights, 20 points above 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 20 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 385 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 FLL to CMH
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 385 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 58.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 379 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- FLL to CMH, every carrier
- Southwest on CMH to FLL, the return leg
- Spirit Airlines on FLL to CMH72.0%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL) delay statistics
- John Glenn Columbus International (CMH) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.