Carrier route record
B6LAX→JFK
JetBlue Airways · Los Angeles to New York
- Flights
- 3,485
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 34%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with JetBlue Airways.
JetBlue on LAX to JFK lands a B, 2 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by a little over an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 3,485 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 3,358 at 81.6% on time.
The US average over the same twelve months is 77.6%, so there is little to separate JetBlue on LAX to JFK from the country as a whole. The variation that matters here is internal: which carrier, and what time of day.
Key figures
On time
79.3%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 3,395 completed flights
Avg delay
71 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.24%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
79.1%
Every carrier on LAX to JFK, 10,287 flights
These figures cover 3,485 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 8.3% 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
JetBlue against every carrier on LAX to JFK
JetBlue flew 3,485 of the 10,287 flights on LAX to JFK, about 34% of it. Its 79.3% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 79.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 81.6% to Frontier at 75.5%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delta Air Lines | 3,358 | 81.6% | 93 min | 1.79% | B |
| JetBlue Airways (this page) | 3,485 | 79.3% | 71 min | 2.24% | B |
| American Airlines | 3,242 | 76.7% | 112 min | 2.19% | B |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 202 | 75.5% | 77 min | 0.50% | B+ |
No carrier stands out. Delta tops the table at 81.6%, 5 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Flight by flight
JetBlue flight numbers on LAX to JFK
Departure window
When JetBlue runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 15 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am462 flights89.1%
- 8am–11am645 flights80.8%
- 11am–2pm690 flights74.3%
- 2pm–5pm714 flights75.4%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am974 flights80.0%
Scale runs 65% to 95%. 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 74.3% on time against 89.1% 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 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 974 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
JetBlue on LAX to JFK through the year
July is the worst month at 64.4% on time, 27 points below May, the best at 91.2%. 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 325 flights.
Across the week, Friday is the strongest day at 84.0% on time and Sunday the weakest at 72.8%. 11 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why JetBlue 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 50,000 reported delay minutes.
- 40%Late-arriving aircraft
- 34%National Airspace System
- 26%Carrier
- 0%Security
40% 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 50,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 40 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 49,561 reported delay minutes.
34% 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 17,000 minutes out of 50,000, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations sit at 2.24% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.34%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
8.3% 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 a little over an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 2,475 miles this is transcontinental flying, and long routes get a quiet structural advantage. Scheduled block time on a flight this length carries more padding in absolute minutes, so a twenty-minute late departure often still becomes an on-time arrival. Read the on-time rate here as slightly flattering next to a short-haul route with the same operational quality.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 75.6% on time across 3,486 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 3,485 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.
What to do with this
Booking JetBlue on LAX to JFK
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. May runs 91.2% on time and July 64.4%, a swing of 27 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of July before you think about anything else. 3,395 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- LAX to JFK, every carrier
- JetBlue on JFK to LAX, the return leg
- Delta Air Lines on LAX to JFK81.6%
- American Airlines on LAX to JFK76.7%
- Frontier Airlines on LAX to JFK75.5%
- JetBlue Airways network-wide record
- Los Angeles International (LAX) delay statistics
- John F. Kennedy International (JFK) 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.