Carrier route record
NKORD→RSW
Spirit Airlines · Chicago to Fort Myers
- Flights
- 372
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 11%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.
Spirit on ORD to RSW draws a D−. Roughly one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 372 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 1,612 at 81.8% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Spirit on ORD to RSW runs 17 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 168 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
60.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 352 completed flights
Avg delay
79 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
5.38%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
76.1%
Every carrier on ORD to RSW, 3,239 flights
These figures cover 372 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 18.2% 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 ORD to RSW
Spirit flew 372 of the 3,239 flights on ORD to RSW, about 11% of it. Its 60.8% on time is 15 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 76.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 81.8% to Spirit at 60.8%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. United Airlines arrives on time 81.8% of the time; American Airlines manages 72.4%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,116 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlines | 1,612 | 81.8% | 67 min | 0.50% | B+ |
| Southwest Airlinesthin sample | 103 | 78.0% | 50 min | 2.91% | B |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 36 | 77.1% | 75 min | 2.78% | B |
| American Airlines | 1,116 | 72.4% | 70 min | 1.88% | C |
| Spirit Airlines (this page) | 372 | 60.8% | 79 min | 5.38% | D− |
United leads American by 9 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.
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 20 points, against 9 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am105 flights64.6%
- 8am–11am41 flights73.2%
- 11am–2pm19 flights—
- 2pm–5pm45 flights53.3%
- 5pm–8pm162 flights54.6%
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 45% to 80%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 73.2% of the time, against 53.3% for the afternoon window. That is 20 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 162 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Spirit on ORD to RSW through the year
- Jul–Sep 202579 flights75.9%
- Oct–Dec 202577 flights65.3%
- Jan–Mar 2026180 flights53.3%
- Apr–Jun 202636 flights51.5%
Scale runs 45% to 80%. 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 60.8% on time across 372 flights.
Spirit on ORD to RSW did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jul–Sep 2025 at 75.9% on time and its weakest Apr–Jun 2026 at 51.5%, a swing of 24 points on roughly 93 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, Thursday is the strongest day at 79.7% on time and Saturday the weakest at 42.5%. 37 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 11,000 reported delay minutes.
- 41%National Airspace System
- 27%Late-arriving aircraft
- 24%Carrier
- 8%Extreme weather
41% 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 4,521 minutes out of 11,000, against a national NAS share of 21%. The split is drawn from 10,930 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations run at 5.38%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in twenty 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. 18.2% 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 1,120 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 70.1% on time across 365 flights, 9 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 9 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 372 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 ORD to RSW
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 5.38% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 8am–11am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 352 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to RSW, every carrier
- Spirit on RSW to ORD, the return leg
- United Airlines on ORD to RSW81.8%
- Southwest Airlines on ORD to RSW78.0%
- American Airlines on ORD to RSW72.4%
- Spirit Airlines network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Southwest Florida International (RSW) 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.