Carrier route record
WNIND→FLL
Southwest Airlines · Indianapolis to Fort Lauderdale
- Flights
- 417
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 40%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on IND to FLL lands a B+, 5 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 roughly 40 minutes on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 417 flights, with a median arrival 7 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, Southwest's IND to FLL record is 5 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 48 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
82.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 414 completed flights
Avg delay
41 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.72%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
78.2%
Every carrier on IND to FLL, 1,044 flights
These figures cover 417 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 7 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
Southwest against every carrier on IND to FLL
Southwest flew 417 of the 1,044 flights on IND to FLL, about 40% of it. Its 82.4% on time is 4 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 78.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 82.4% to Allegiant at 67.4%. 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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlines (this page) | 417 | 82.4% | 41 min | 0.72% | B+ |
| Spirit Airlines | 372 | 80.5% | 105 min | 3.49% | B− |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 23 | 71.4% | 31 min | 8.70% | C− |
| Allegiant Airthin sample | 232 | 67.4% | 68 min | 1.29% | C |
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 22 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–8am166 flights92.1%
- 8am–11am57 flights89.5%
- 11am–2pm66 flights69.7%
- 2pm–5pm95 flights81.1%
- 5pm–8pm18 flights—
- 8pm–5am15 flights—
Scale runs 60% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 69.7% on time against 92.1% for 5am–8am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 166 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on IND to FLL through the year
January is the weak month at 62.8% on time, against 100.0% 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. March was the busiest month here, with 59 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 92.1% on time and Sunday the weakest at 70.8%. 21 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Southwest 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 3,015 reported delay minutes.
- 38%National Airspace System
- 35%Late-arriving aircraft
- 26%Carrier
- 1%Extreme weather
35% 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 3,015 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 28 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 3,015 reported delay minutes.
38% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 1,132 minutes out of 3,015, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations are rare at 0.72%, 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
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 1.9% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. Connections built on this flight are about as safe as US domestic connections get, though a cancelled flight still ignores every layover you give it.
The 1,005 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 64.6% on time across 420 flights, 18 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 18 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 417 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 IND to FLL
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 417 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 82.4% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 414 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- IND to FLL, every carrier
- Southwest on FLL to IND, the return leg
- Spirit Airlines on IND to FLL80.5%
- Allegiant Air on IND to FLL67.4%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Indianapolis International (IND) delay statistics
- Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL) 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.