Carrier route record
WNFLL→MSY
Southwest Airlines · Fort Lauderdale to New Orleans
- Flights
- 368
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 26%
- 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 MSY draws a C+. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is about 45 minutes behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 368 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 Southwest on FLL to MSY runs 11 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 110 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
66.6%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 368 completed flights
Avg delay
44 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.00%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
67.6%
Every carrier on FLL to MSY, 1,398 flights
These figures cover 368 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. On-time means an arrival less than 15 minutes after the scheduled gate time, the same threshold the Department of Transportation uses in its own reports. Cancelled and diverted flights are excluded from the on-time rate and counted separately, which is why the cancellation column matters on its own.
Carrier by carrier
Southwest against every carrier on FLL to MSY
Southwest flew 368 of the 1,398 flights on FLL to MSY, about 26% of it. Its 66.6% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 67.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two 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; JetBlue Airways manages 60.0%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 426 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 (this page) | 368 | 66.6% | 44 min | 0.00% | C+ |
| JetBlue Airways | 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 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 29 points, against 14 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am5 flights—
- 8am–11am33 flights84.8%
- 11am–2pm115 flights76.5%
- 2pm–5pm152 flights58.6%
- 5pm–8pm57 flights56.1%
- 8pm–5am6 flights—
Scale runs 50% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 56.1% on time, against 84.8% 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 152 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on FLL to MSY through the year
October is the best month on the calendar at 90.0% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. March was the busiest month here, with 35 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 83.7% on time and Friday the weakest at 57.7%. 26 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 50% of the 5,441 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.
- 50%Late-arriving aircraft
- 31%Carrier
- 15%National Airspace System
- 5%Extreme weather
50% 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 5,441 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 11 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 5,441 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 84.8% on time here.
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
6.5% 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 about 45 minutes, which a normal layover absorbs.
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 74.0% on time across 368 flights, 7 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 7 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 368 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 MSY
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 368 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 66.6% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 368 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- FLL to MSY, every carrier
- Southwest on MSY to FLL, the return leg
- Spirit Airlines on FLL to MSY73.6%
- JetBlue Airways on FLL to MSY60.0%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL) delay statistics
- Louis Armstrong New Orleans International (MSY) delay statistics
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
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.