Carrier route record
WNLGA→MSY
Southwest Airlines · New York to New Orleans
- Flights
- 333
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 23%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on LGA to MSY earns a D−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 55.0% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 23 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average a little over an hour. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 333 flights, with a median arrival 8 minutes late.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Southwest on LGA to MSY runs 23 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 226 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
55.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 318 completed flights
Avg delay
72 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
4.20%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
70.9%
Every carrier on LGA to MSY, 1,421 flights
These figures cover 333 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 19.5% 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
Southwest against every carrier on LGA to MSY
Southwest flew 333 of the 1,421 flights on LGA to MSY, about 23% of it. Its 55.0% on time is 16 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 70.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 79.6% to Southwest at 55.0%. Three 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delta Air Lines | 719 | 79.6% | 78 min | 4.45% | B− |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 4 | 75.0% | 61 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| Republic Airwaysthin sample | 20 | 73.7% | 48 min | 0.00% | C+ |
| American Airlinesthin sample | 345 | 68.1% | 87 min | 2.61% | C |
| Southwest Airlines (this page)thin sample | 333 | 55.0% | 72 min | 4.20% | D− |
Departure window
When Southwest 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 333 flights.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am5 flights—
- 11am–2pm13 flights—
- 2pm–5pm129 flights50.4%
- 5pm–8pm186 flights57.1%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 40% to 65%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is the strongest at 57.1% on time. The full set of windows spans 7 points.
Across the year
Southwest on LGA to MSY through the year
- Jul–Sep 202579 flights59.7%
- Oct–Dec 202582 flights45.0%
- Jan–Mar 202685 flights70.0%
- Apr–Jun 202687 flights45.7%
Scale runs 35% 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 55.0% on time across 333 flights.
Southwest on LGA to MSY did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jan–Mar 2026 at 70.0% on time and its weakest Oct–Dec 2025 at 45.0%, a swing of 25 points on roughly 83 flights a quarter. The twelve-month rate averages over that, so if you are flying in a weak quarter the quarter's own figure is the better guide.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 59.2% on time and Monday the weakest at 49.0%. 10 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Southwest runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 60% of the 10,000 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.
- 60%Late-arriving aircraft
- 22%National Airspace System
- 18%Carrier
- 0%Extreme weather
60% 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 10,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 59 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 10,352 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations run at 4.20%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in 25 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
For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 19.5% 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 1,183 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 72.7% on time across 333 flights, 18 points above 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. 333 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 LGA to MSY
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.20% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 5pm–8pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 318 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- LGA to MSY, every carrier
- Southwest on MSY to LGA, the return leg
- Delta Air Lines on LGA to MSY79.6%
- American Airlines on LGA to MSY68.1%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- LaGuardia (LGA) delay statistics
- Louis Armstrong New Orleans International (MSY) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
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.