Carrier route record

NKLGA→DFW

Spirit Airlines · New York to Dallas-Fort Worth

Flights: 195
Period: September 2025 to August 2026
Share of route: 3%
Carriers: 4

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

Spirit on LGA to DFW draws a C−. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 195 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 4,309 at 71.2% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so Spirit on LGA to DFW runs 11 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 108 extra late arrivals.

On time

66.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 179 completed flights

Avg delay

78 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

8.21%

National rate is 1.89%

Whole route

70.1%

Every carrier on LGA to DFW, 6,646 flights

These figures cover 195 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 17.9% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.

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Carrier by carrier

Spirit against every carrier on LGA to DFW

Spirit flew 195 of the 6,646 flights on LGA to DFW, about 3% of it. Its 66.5% on time is 4 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 70.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from American at 71.2% to Frontier at 59.3%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The two carriers here are closely matched: about a point 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.

On-time performance by carrier on LGA to DFW
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
American Airlines	4,309	71.2%	93 min	4.92%	C−
Delta Air Lines	1,851	69.8%	73 min	4.97%	C−
Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample	195	66.5%	78 min	8.21%	C−
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	291	59.3%	108 min	7.22%	D−

Delta Air Lines cancels 5.0% of what it schedules here, the highest in the table. A cancelled flight never appears in an on-time rate, so read that column alongside the punctuality one rather than after it.

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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 195 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Spirit's LGA to DFW record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 66.5% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Spirit on LGA to DFW through the year

Jul–Sep 20254 flights—
Oct–Dec 202573 flights64.7%
Jan–Mar 202689 flights69.2%
Apr–Jun 202629 flights—

Scale runs 55% to 75%. 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 66.5% on time across 195 flights.

Split by quarter, Spirit on LGA to DFW logged 4 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 73 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 89 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 29 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 66.5% annual figure is the one to use.

Arrival by arrival

How late Spirit on LGA to DFW runs when it is late

Spirit on LGA to DFW often beats the schedule: 61 of 179 completed flights, 34%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. When Spirit on LGA to DFW is late it tends to be very late: 32 of its 60 late arrivals were an hour or more behind, and 8 were two hours or more.

15+ min early61 flights34.1%
Within 15 min58 flights32.4%
15–29 min late15 flights8.4%
30–59 min late13 flights7.3%
1–2 hours late24 flights13.4%
2+ hours late8 flights4.5%

Scale runs 0% to 100%.

Share of 179 completed flights by arrival against schedule.

19 of 73 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 26% of them. 6 flights left on time and still arrived late.

The worst days

Worst days for Spirit on LGA to DFW

The latest arrival of the period was on 6 September 2025, 8 hours 37 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as national airspace system delay. The same cause led on three of the five worst days.

The latest arrivals of Spirit on LGA to DFW in the period
Date	Arrived late by	Largest filed cause
6 September 2025	8 hours 37 minutes	National Airspace System
7 December 2025	3 hours 41 minutes	National Airspace System
7 February 2026	3 hours 5 minutes	Carrier
18 January 2026	2 hours 58 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
17 November 2025	2 hours 26 minutes	National Airspace System

Delay causes

Why Spirit runs late on this route

National Airspace System accounts for 62% of the 4,664 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.

National Airspace System
62%
Late-arriving aircraft
24%
Carrier
14%
Security
0%

62% 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 2,884 minutes out of 4,664, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 4,664 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations run at 8.21%, against 1.89% nationally. That is about one flight in twelve cancelled outright. A cancelled flight is invisible in every on-time figure on this page, so the punctuality numbers above describe only the flights that actually operated.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

17.9% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.

The 1,389 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.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 63.2% on time across 196 flights, 3 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 3 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 195 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 LGA to DFW

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 8.21% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 8pm–5am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 179 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated 22 October 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.

Key figures