Carrier route record

NKIAH→MSY

Spirit Airlines · Houston to New Orleans

Flights: 148
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 5%
Carriers: 4

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

Spirit on IAH to MSY lands a B+, 6 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 148 flights, with a median arrival 6 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, Spirit's IAH to MSY record is 6 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 61 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

83.7%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 147 completed flights

Avg delay

66 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.68%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

82.9%

Every carrier on IAH to MSY, 2,962 flights

These figures cover 148 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 6 minutes early, which is the part an average hides: most flights here are fine, and the on-time rate is decided by a tail of badly late ones. On-time means under 15 minutes late, the DOT's own threshold.

Carrier by carrier

Spirit against every carrier on IAH to MSY

Spirit flew 148 of the 2,962 flights on IAH to MSY, about 5% of it. Its 83.7% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 82.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Spirit at 83.7% to SkyWest at 75.0%. Two 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.

On-time performance by carrier on IAH to MSY
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample	148	83.7%	66 min	0.68%	B+
United Airlines	2,783	82.9%	63 min	0.25%	B+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	27	76.9%	195 min	3.70%	B−
SkyWest Airlinesthin sample	4	75.0%	138 min	0.00%	B+

Departure window

When Spirit 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 148 flights.

5am–8am30 flights80.0%
8am–11am8 flights—
11am–2pm14 flights—
2pm–5pm30 flights—
5pm–8pm48 flights83.3%
8pm–5am18 flights—

Scale runs 70% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 5pm–8pm window is the strongest at 83.3% on time. The full set of windows spans 3 points.

Across the year

Spirit on IAH to MSY through the year

Jul–Sep 202588 flights82.8%
Oct–Dec 202560 flights85.0%

Scale runs 75% to 90%. 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 83.7% on time across 148 flights.

Split by quarter, Spirit on IAH to MSY logged 88 flights in Jul–Sep 2025 and 60 flights in Oct–Dec 2025. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 83.7% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why Spirit runs late on this route

Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 1,594 reported delay minutes.

Carrier
40%
National Airspace System
31%
Late-arriving aircraft
27%
Extreme weather
3%

The largest share of delay minutes, 40%, 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 630 of the 1,594 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 1,594 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations are rare at 0.68%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Roughly one flight in 100 is called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

5.4% 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 an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.

At 305 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 5pm–8pm window matters as much as it does.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 77.9% on time across 146 flights, 6 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 6 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 148 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 Spirit on IAH to MSY

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 148 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 83.7% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 147 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