Route reliability record
ISP→MCO
Islip to Orlando
- Flights
- 1,428
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 971 mi
- Carriers
- 3
This route sits in the middle of the pack with a C. About seven flights in ten arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 5 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. The late ones land a little over an hour behind schedule. That rests on 1,428 ISP to MCO flights, of which JetBlue Airways flew 374 at 74.5% on time.
Best time to fly ISP to MCO: a 5am–8am departure, ideally on a Tuesday. Flights in that window arrived on time 90.0% of the time and Tuesday flights 79.4%, against 72.8% for the route overall.
JetBlue Airways is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 74.5% on time across 374 flights.
Key figures
On time
72.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,393 completed flights
Avg delay
75 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.89%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
JetBlue
74.5% on time across 374 flights
These figures cover 1,428 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 11.3% 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
Which airline is most reliable on ISP to MCO
The three carriers here are closely matched: 5 points separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JetBlue Airways | 374 | 74.5% | 75 min | 1.60% | C |
| Southwest Airlines | 678 | 73.4% | 62 min | 1.47% | C |
| Frontier Airlines | 376 | 69.9% | 97 min | 2.93% | C |
No carrier stands out. JetBlue tops the table at 74.5%, 5 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Best ways to make this trip
The most reliable ways to fly Islip to Orlando
Every airline on this route and on the routes between nearby airports, ranked by how often a scheduled flight actually operated and arrived on time. 4 of the top 5 use a different airport at one end.
| Option | Airline | Success | On time | Cancelled | Best departure | Most punctual flight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. EWR → MCONewark to Orlando | United Airlines | 78.0% | 79.4% | 1.82% | 5am–8am, Tue | UA 1900 17:29 |
| 2. JFK → MCONew York to Orlando | Delta Air Lines | 75.3% | 77.6% | 2.93% | 5am–8am, Tue | DL 2019 09:00 |
| 3. LGA → MCONew York to Orlando | Spirit Airlines | 74.0% | 77.8% | 4.90% | 5am–8am, Fri | — |
| 4. ISP → MCOIslip to Orlando | JetBlue Airways | 73.3% | 74.5% | 1.60% | 8am–11am, Tue | — |
| 5. HPN → MCOWhite Plains to Orlando | JetBlue Airways | 72.8% | 74.2% | 1.94% | 11am–2pm, Wed | B6 595 14:30 |
Success is the share of scheduled flights that operated and arrived less than 15 minutes late, so a cancelled flight counts against it. “(route)” means the best time comes from every carrier on the route rather than this airline alone.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 36 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am330 flights90.0%
- 8am–11am241 flights81.8%
- 11am–2pm207 flights78.6%
- 2pm–5pm240 flights65.8%
- 5pm–8pm310 flights53.9%
- 8pm–5am100 flights56.4%
Scale runs 45% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 53.9% on time, against 90.0% for the 5am–8am 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 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 330 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 21 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
August is the worst month at 60.7% on time, 21 points below October, the best at 82.0%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. December was the busiest month here, with 132 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 79.4% on time and Friday the weakest at 66.0%. 13 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 46% of the 28,000 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.
- 46%Late-arriving aircraft
- 27%National Airspace System
- 25%Carrier
- 2%Extreme weather
46% 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 28,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 24 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 28,498 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 90.0% on time here.
Cancellations sit at 1.89% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.56%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here actually costs
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 11.3% 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 971 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 runs 74.8% on time across 1,427 flights, within 2 points of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
The sample behind these figures is 1,428 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in MCO after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. October runs 82.0% on time and August 60.7%, a swing of 21 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of August before you think about anything else. 1,393 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
ISP to MCO questions
How often is ISP to MCO delayed?
Roughly one flight in four arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 27.2% of the 1,428 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by a little over an hour on average.
Which airline is most reliable on ISP to MCO?
JetBlue Airways leads at 74.5% on time across 374 flights. Frontier Airlines is at the other end on 69.9%, a gap of 5 points. Sample size matters as much as the percentage: a rate built from a few hundred flights moves around far more than one built from ten thousand.
What time of day has the fewest delays on ISP to MCO?
The 5am–8am departure window is the strongest at 90.0% on time. The 5pm–8pm window is the weakest at 53.9%, 36 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are August delays on ISP to MCO?
August is the weakest month at 60.7% on time, compared with 82.0% in October. Across the year that is 21 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- MCO to ISP — the return legseparate record
- Orlando International (MCO) delay statistics
- JetBlue Airways on ISP to MCO74.5%
- Southwest Airlines on ISP to MCO73.4%
- Frontier Airlines on ISP to MCO69.9%
- ISP to PBI, a related route71.9%
- ATL to MCO, a related route70.7%
- ISP to BWI, a related route84.9%
- JetBlue Airways on-time record74.5%
- Southwest Airlines on-time record73.4%
- Frontier Airlines on-time record69.9%
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
Direction matters. ISP to MCO and MCO to ISP are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.