Carrier route record

AAFLL→LGA

American Airlines · Fort Lauderdale to New York

Flights: 481
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 10%
Carriers: 4

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

American on FLL to LGA earns a D−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 55.5% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 22 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average an hour and a half. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 481 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 1,598 at 72.7% on time.

Delta Air Lines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 72.7% on time across 1,598 flights.

On time

55.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 456 completed flights

Avg delay

97 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

4.37%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

66.3%

Every carrier on FLL to LGA, 4,653 flights

These figures cover 481 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 21.7% 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

American against every carrier on FLL to LGA

American flew 481 of the 4,653 flights on FLL to LGA, about 10% of it. Its 55.5% on time is 11 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 66.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 72.7% to American at 55.5%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Delta Air Lines arrives on time 72.7% of the time; JetBlue Airways manages 63.5%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,598 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on FLL to LGA
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Delta Air Lines	1,598	72.7%	68 min	3.69%	C−
Spirit Airlines	976	65.9%	77 min	6.45%	C−
JetBlue Airways	1,598	63.5%	68 min	3.44%	D−
American Airlines (this page)	481	55.5%	97 min	4.37%	D−

Spirit Airlines cancels 6.5% of what it schedules here, the highest in the table. A cancelled flight never appears in an on-time rate, so read that column alongside the punctuality one rather than after it.

Departure window

When American runs best on this route

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 12 points, against 9 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am—
8am–11am—
11am–2pm204 flights60.0%
2pm–5pm58 flights61.8%
5pm–8pm219 flights49.5%
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 40% to 65%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 49.5% on time, against 61.8% for the 2pm–5pm 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 219 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

American on FLL to LGA through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.January best, March worst

Delays peak in March, when the on-time rate falls to 39.0%. January is the strongest month at 71.7%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 33 points. December was the busiest month here, with 72 flights.

Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 69.2% on time and Sunday the weakest at 35.9%. 33 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why American runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 59% of the 20,000 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
59%
National Airspace System
16%
Carrier
13%
Extreme weather
11%

Extreme weather accounts for 11% of delay minutes, well above the single-digit share typical across the system. Weather delays are lumpy: they arrive as whole bad days rather than as a steady drag, so the monthly strip above is the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 1.8 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 19,717 reported delay minutes.

59% 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 20,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 5 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.

Cancellations run at 4.37%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly one flight in 25 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

For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 21.7% 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 1,076 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 70.3% on time across 481 flights, 15 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 15 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 481 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 American on FLL to LGA

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.37% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 2pm–5pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 456 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