Carrier route record
NKMCO→BWI
Spirit Airlines · Orlando to Baltimore
- Flights
- 589
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 13%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.
Spirit on MCO to BWI draws a C−. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is about an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 589 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Southwest Airlines, flew 3,584 at 76.8% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Spirit on MCO to BWI runs 12 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 117 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
65.9%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 566 completed flights
Avg delay
62 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.23%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
75.4%
Every carrier on MCO to BWI, 4,711 flights
These figures cover 589 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 13.3% 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
Spirit against every carrier on MCO to BWI
Spirit flew 589 of the 4,711 flights on MCO to BWI, about 13% of it. Its 65.9% on time is 10 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 75.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 76.8% to Spirit at 65.9%.
The two carriers here are closely matched: half 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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlines | 3,584 | 76.8% | 59 min | 1.84% | B |
| Frontier Airlines | 538 | 76.5% | 77 min | 1.67% | B |
| Spirit Airlines (this page) | 589 | 65.9% | 62 min | 3.23% | C− |
No carrier stands out. Southwest tops the table at 76.8%, half a point clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Departure window
When Spirit runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 28 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–8am33 flights78.8%
- 8am–11am100 flights70.7%
- 11am–2pm73 flights81.9%
- 2pm–5pm72 flights67.1%
- 5pm–8pm130 flights64.8%
- 8pm–5am181 flights53.9%
Scale runs 45% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 53.9% on time, against 81.9% for the 11am–2pm 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 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 181 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Spirit on MCO to BWI through the year
July is the worst month at 50.7% on time, 39 points below September, the best at 89.7%. 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 75 flights.
Across the week, Friday is the strongest day at 70.9% on time and Sunday the weakest at 54.8%. 16 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 12,000 reported delay minutes.
- 38%Carrier
- 36%National Airspace System
- 22%Late-arriving aircraft
- 4%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
36% 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 4,261 minutes out of 12,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 11,959 reported delay minutes.
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 4,573 of the 12,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations run at 3.23%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in 30 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. 13.3% 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 787 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 70.2% on time across 593 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 589 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 MCO to BWI
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.23% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you about an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 11am–2pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 566 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- MCO to BWI, every carrier
- Spirit on BWI to MCO, the return leg
- Southwest Airlines on MCO to BWI76.8%
- Frontier Airlines on MCO to BWI76.5%
- Spirit Airlines network-wide record
- Orlando International (MCO) delay statistics
- Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall (BWI) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- 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.