Carrier route record

WNMCO→DTW

Southwest Airlines · Orlando to Detroit

Flights: 128
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 3%
Carriers: 4

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.

Southwest on MCO to DTW earns a D+, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 55.1% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 22 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average roughly 55 minutes. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 128 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Frontier Airlines, flew 428 at 82.7% on time.

Frontier Airlines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 82.7% on time across 428 flights.

On time

55.1%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 127 completed flights

Avg delay

53 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.78%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

73.3%

Every carrier on MCO to DTW, 3,676 flights

These figures cover 128 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 12.6% 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 DTW

Southwest flew 128 of the 3,676 flights on MCO to DTW, about 3% of it. Its 55.1% on time is 18 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 73.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Frontier at 82.7% to Southwest at 55.1%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Frontier Airlines arrives on time 82.7% of the time; Spirit Airlines manages 69.4%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 950 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on MCO to DTW
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Frontier Airlines	428	82.7%	56 min	0.93%	B+
Delta Air Lines	2,170	74.2%	77 min	0.97%	C+
Spirit Airlines	950	69.4%	66 min	1.79%	C
Southwest Airlines (this page)thin sample	128	55.1%	53 min	0.78%	D+

The spread between Frontier and Spirit is 13 points, wide enough that it should decide the booking. On a hundred trips that is 13 more arrivals inside the on-time window.

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 128 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Southwest's MCO to DTW record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 55.1% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Southwest on MCO to DTW through the year

Jul–Sep 202510 flights—
Oct–Dec 202549 flights63.3%
Jan–Mar 202657 flights50.0%
Apr–Jun 202612 flights—

Scale runs 40% to 70%. 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 55.1% on time across 128 flights.

Split by quarter, Southwest on MCO to DTW logged 10 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 49 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 57 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 12 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 55.1% annual figure is the one to use.

Across the week, Sunday is the strongest day at 60.0% on time and Saturday the weakest at 51.1%. 9 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 54% of the 2,995 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.

Late-arriving aircraft
54%
Carrier
23%
National Airspace System
22%
Extreme weather
1%

54% 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 2,995 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 44 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 2,995 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations are rare at 0.78%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Roughly one flight in 100 is called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.

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. 12.6% 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 957 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 69.0% on time across 127 flights, 14 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 14 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 128 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 DTW

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 128 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 55.1% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 127 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

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.

Key figures