Carrier route record
B6FLL→MSY
JetBlue Airways · Fort Lauderdale to New Orleans
- Flights
- 426
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 30%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with JetBlue Airways.
JetBlue on FLL to MSY draws a D. Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is about an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 426 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Spirit Airlines, flew 604 at 73.6% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so JetBlue on FLL to MSY runs 18 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 176 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
60.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 418 completed flights
Avg delay
67 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.64%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
67.6%
Every carrier on FLL to MSY, 1,398 flights
These figures cover 426 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 15.8% 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
JetBlue against every carrier on FLL to MSY
JetBlue flew 426 of the 1,398 flights on FLL to MSY, about 30% of it. Its 60.0% on time is 8 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 67.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Spirit at 73.6% to JetBlue at 60.0%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Spirit Airlines arrives on time 73.6% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 66.6%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 368 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spirit Airlines | 604 | 73.6% | 63 min | 3.31% | C− |
| Southwest Airlines | 368 | 66.6% | 44 min | 0.00% | C+ |
| JetBlue Airways (this page) | 426 | 60.0% | 67 min | 1.64% | D |
Spirit Airlines cancels 3.3% 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 JetBlue runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 23 points, against 7 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am13 flights—
- 11am–2pm112 flights64.5%
- 2pm–5pm59 flights41.1%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am242 flights60.7%
Scale runs 35% to 70%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The best window here is not the first bank but the 11am–2pm slot at 64.5% on time, ahead of 2pm–5pm at 41.1%. Where the curve peaks mid-day rather than at dawn, the constraint is usually congestion at one end rather than the aircraft's own rotation. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 242 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
JetBlue on FLL to MSY through the year
December is the weak month at 40.0% on time, against 71.7% in November. Winter delays cluster: a single storm system can account for most of a month's shortfall, so an average December hides both very good weeks and genuinely unflyable days. May was the busiest month here, with 64 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 76.0% on time and Sunday the weakest at 45.3%. 31 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why JetBlue runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 49% of the 11,000 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.
- 49%Late-arriving aircraft
- 35%Carrier
- 14%National Airspace System
- 2%Extreme weather
49% 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 11,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 22 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 11,197 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 35%, 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 3,883 of the 11,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations sit at 1.64% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.23%.
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. 15.8% 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 673 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 71.3% on time across 425 flights, 11 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 11 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 426 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 JetBlue on FLL to MSY
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 426 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 60.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 418 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- FLL to MSY, every carrier
- JetBlue on MSY to FLL, the return leg
- Spirit Airlines on FLL to MSY73.6%
- Southwest Airlines on FLL to MSY66.6%
- JetBlue Airways network-wide record
- Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL) delay statistics
- Louis Armstrong New Orleans International (MSY) 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.