Carrier route record
NKRIC→FLL
Spirit Airlines · Richmond to Fort Lauderdale
- Flights
- 258
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 32%
- Carriers
- 2
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Spirit Airlines.
Spirit on RIC to FLL draws a D−. About 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 258 flights, with a median arrival 4 minutes late.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Spirit on RIC to FLL runs 13 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 128 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
64.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 244 completed flights
Avg delay
75 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
5.04%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
74.1%
Every carrier on RIC to FLL, 809 flights
These figures cover 258 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 13.1% 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 RIC to FLL
Spirit flew 258 of the 809 flights on RIC to FLL, about 32% of it. Its 64.8% on time is 9 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 74.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of two carriers on the route, where the range runs from JetBlue at 78.4% to Spirit at 64.8%.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JetBlue Airways | 551 | 78.4% | 81 min | 2.90% | B |
| Spirit Airlines (this page)thin sample | 258 | 64.8% | 75 min | 5.04% | D− |
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 34 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–8am22 flights—
- 8am–11am116 flights72.4%
- 11am–2pm40 flights70.0%
- 2pm–5pm5 flights—
- 5pm–8pm50 flights38.3%
- 8pm–5am25 flights—
Scale runs 30% to 80%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 38.3% on time, against 72.4% for the 8am–11am 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 116 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Spirit on RIC to FLL through the year
- Jul–Sep 202567 flights64.2%
- Oct–Dec 202582 flights70.0%
- Jan–Mar 202678 flights63.8%
- Apr–Jun 202631 flights—
Scale runs 55% to 75%. 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 64.8% on time across 258 flights.
Quarter by quarter Spirit on RIC to FLL held fairly steady: 64.2% in Jul–Sep 2025, 70.0% in Oct–Dec 2025 and 63.8% in Jan–Mar 2026. A spread of 6 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.
Across the week, Sunday is the strongest day at 68.3% on time and Monday the weakest at 58.7%. 10 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 6,441 reported delay minutes.
- 36%Late-arriving aircraft
- 32%National Airspace System
- 30%Carrier
- 1%Extreme weather
- 0%Security
36% 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 6,441 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 30 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 6,441 reported delay minutes.
32% 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 2,072 minutes out of 6,441, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations run at 5.04%, 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. 13.1% 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 806 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 runs 66.1% on time across 258 flights, within about a point of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 258 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 RIC to FLL
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 5.04% 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. 244 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
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.