Carrier route record

NKLAS→SNA

Spirit Airlines · Las Vegas to Santa Ana

Flights: 780
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 18%
Carriers: 4

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

Spirit on LAS to SNA earns an A. Close to nine flights in ten arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 10 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 780 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, SkyWest Airlines, flew 760 at 86.7% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Spirit's LAS to SNA record is 10 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 99 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

87.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 768 completed flights

Avg delay

71 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.54%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

81.9%

Every carrier on LAS to SNA, 4,252 flights

These figures cover 780 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 13 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 LAS to SNA

Spirit flew 780 of the 4,252 flights on LAS to SNA, about 18% of it. Its 87.5% on time is 6 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 81.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Spirit at 87.5% to Southwest at 78.8%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. SkyWest Airlines arrives on time 86.7% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 78.8%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 2,498 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on LAS to SNA
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Spirit Airlines (this page)	780	87.5%	71 min	1.54%	A
SkyWest Airlines	760	86.7%	81 min	0.66%	A+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	214	81.7%	61 min	0.47%	B+
Southwest Airlines	2,498	78.8%	48 min	0.52%	B+

SkyWest leads Southwest by 8 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.

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 780 flights.

5am–8am15 flights—
8am–11am121 flights85.6%
11am–2pm161 flights88.7%
2pm–5pm85 flights84.7%
5pm–8pm104 flights81.7%
8pm–5am294 flights90.6%

Scale runs 75% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The overnight block holds up unusually well at 90.6% on time across 294 flights. Red-eyes fly into empty airspace and empty gates, and they are the first rotation of the aircraft's day rather than the last. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 294 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Spirit on LAS to SNA through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.December best, August worst

August is the worst month at 81.1% on time, 12 points below December, the best at 93.1%. 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. July was the busiest month here, with 101 flights.

Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 94.4% on time and Sunday the weakest at 79.5%. 15 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

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 6,837 reported delay minutes.

National Airspace System
38%
Carrier
38%
Late-arriving aircraft
21%
Extreme weather
3%

The largest share of delay minutes, 38%, 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 2,620 of the 6,837 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 6,837 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 2,624 minutes out of 6,837, against a national NAS share of 21%.

Cancellations sit at 1.54% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.5% 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.

At 226 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 8pm–5am window matters as much as it does.

The return leg runs 88.5% on time across 781 flights, within about a point of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 780 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 LAS to SNA

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 780 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 87.5% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 768 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