Carrier route record
WNMCO→ORD
Southwest Airlines · Orlando to Chicago
- Flights
- 800
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 13%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on MCO to ORD 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 800 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 2,459 at 75.6% on time.
United Airlines is the most reliable of the four carriers covered here at 75.6% on time across 2,459 flights.
Key figures
On time
66.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 785 completed flights
Avg delay
60 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.38%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
70.6%
Every carrier on MCO to ORD, 6,350 flights
These figures cover 800 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 10.8% 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 ORD
Southwest flew 800 of the 6,350 flights on MCO to ORD, about 13% of it. Its 66.8% on time is 4 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 70.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number four of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 75.6% to Spirit at 60.0%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. United Airlines arrives on time 75.6% of the time; Spirit Airlines manages 60.0%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 583 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlines | 2,459 | 75.6% | 81 min | 0.85% | B+ |
| Frontier Airlines | 366 | 72.0% | 97 min | 2.46% | C |
| American Airlines | 2,142 | 68.9% | 86 min | 2.19% | C |
| Southwest Airlines (this page) | 800 | 66.8% | 60 min | 1.38% | C |
| Spirit Airlines | 583 | 60.0% | 74 min | 4.12% | D− |
Spirit Airlines cancels 4.1% 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.
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 37 points, against 16 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am91 flights87.9%
- 8am–11am194 flights79.2%
- 11am–2pm128 flights64.8%
- 2pm–5pm164 flights50.9%
- 5pm–8pm222 flights59.3%
- 8pm–5am1 flights—
Scale runs 40% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 87.9% of the time, against 50.9% for the afternoon window. That is 37 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 222 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on MCO to ORD through the year
December is the weak month at 58.9% on time, against 85.0% 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. May was the busiest month here, with 93 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 73.9% on time and Friday the weakest at 57.1%. 17 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Southwest 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 16,000 reported delay minutes.
- 35%National Airspace System
- 33%Late-arriving aircraft
- 27%Carrier
- 3%Extreme weather
- 1%Security
35% 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 5,544 minutes out of 16,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 15,642 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 87.9% on time here.
Cancellations sit at 1.38% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.50%.
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. 10.8% 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 1,005 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 73.9% on time across 801 flights, 7 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 7 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 800 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 ORD
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 800 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 66.8% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 785 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- MCO to ORD, every carrier
- Southwest on ORD to MCO, the return leg
- United Airlines on MCO to ORD75.6%
- Frontier Airlines on MCO to ORD72.0%
- American Airlines on MCO to ORD68.9%
- Spirit Airlines on MCO to ORD60.0%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Orlando International (MCO) delay statistics
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
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.