Carrier route record
WNMCO→BUF
Southwest Airlines · Orlando to Buffalo
- Flights
- 950
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 54%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on MCO to BUF draws a C+. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is roughly 50 minutes behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 950 flights, with a median arrival 3 minutes late.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Southwest on MCO to BUF runs 11 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 114 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
66.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 936 completed flights
Avg delay
51 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.95%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
68.1%
Every carrier on MCO to BUF, 1,771 flights
These figures cover 950 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.7% 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 MCO to BUF
Southwest flew 950 of the 1,771 flights on MCO to BUF, most of the route. Its 66.2% on time is 2 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 68.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Frontier at 76.1% to Southwest at 66.2%. One 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 288 | 76.1% | 69 min | 1.39% | B |
| JetBlue Airways | 533 | 67.2% | 70 min | 1.50% | C |
| Southwest Airlines (this page) | 950 | 66.2% | 51 min | 0.95% | C+ |
Departure window
When Southwest runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 49 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am88 flights95.5%
- 8am–11am260 flights83.7%
- 11am–2pm102 flights61.4%
- 2pm–5pm176 flights58.7%
- 5pm–8pm123 flights54.6%
- 8pm–5am201 flights46.7%
Scale runs 40% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 46.7% on time, against 95.5% 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 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 260 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on MCO to BUF through the year
February is the weak month at 54.2% on time, against 83.1% in September. Winter delays cluster: a single storm system can account for most of a month's shortfall, so an average December hides both very good weeks and genuinely unflyable days. March was the busiest month here, with 99 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 84.4% on time and Sunday the weakest at 57.1%. 27 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 53% of the 16,000 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.
- 53%Late-arriving aircraft
- 30%Carrier
- 15%National Airspace System
- 1%Extreme weather
- 1%Security
53% 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 16,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 52 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 16,254 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 95.5% on time here.
Cancellations sit at 0.95% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.53%.
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. 9.7% 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 1,011 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 75.9% on time across 949 flights, 10 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 10 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 950 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 MCO to BUF
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 950 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 66.2% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 936 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- MCO to BUF, every carrier
- Southwest on BUF to MCO, the return leg
- Frontier Airlines on MCO to BUF76.1%
- JetBlue Airways on MCO to BUF67.2%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Orlando International (MCO) 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.