Carrier route record
WNRSW→ORD
Southwest Airlines · Fort Myers to Chicago
- Flights
- 103
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 3%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on RSW to ORD earns a D, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 56.0% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 22 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average a little over an hour. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 103 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 1,612 at 80.7% on time.
United Airlines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 80.7% on time across 1,612 flights.
Key figures
On time
56.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 100 completed flights
Avg delay
78 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.94%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
76.5%
Every carrier on RSW to ORD, 3,232 flights
These figures cover 103 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 18.0% 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 RSW to ORD
Southwest flew 103 of the 3,232 flights on RSW to ORD, about 3% of it. Its 56.0% on time is 21 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 76.5%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 80.7% to Southwest at 56.0%. One 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 80.7% of the time; Spirit Airlines manages 70.1%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 365 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlines | 1,612 | 80.7% | 73 min | 0.68% | B+ |
| American Airlines | 1,116 | 74.3% | 91 min | 1.97% | C |
| Frontier Airlinesthin sample | 36 | 71.4% | 97 min | 2.78% | C |
| Spirit Airlines | 365 | 70.1% | 77 min | 5.21% | C− |
| Southwest Airlines (this page)thin sample | 103 | 56.0% | 78 min | 1.94% | D |
Spirit Airlines cancels 5.2% 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 15 points, against 11 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am8 flights—
- 11am–2pm30 flights46.7%
- 2pm–5pm65 flights61.3%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 40% to 65%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 46.7% on time against 61.3% for 2pm–5pm. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 65 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on RSW to ORD through the year
- Oct–Dec 202516 flights—
- Jan–Mar 202641 flights52.5%
- Apr–Jun 202646 flights65.9%
Scale runs 45% 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 56.0% on time across 103 flights.
Split by quarter, Southwest on RSW to ORD logged 16 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 41 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 46 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 56.0% annual figure is the one to use.
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 3,441 reported delay minutes.
- 38%National Airspace System
- 36%Late-arriving aircraft
- 25%Carrier
- 1%Extreme weather
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 3,441 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 36 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 3,441 reported delay minutes.
38% 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 1,316 minutes out of 3,441, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations sit at 1.94% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.97%.
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. 18.0% 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 78.0% on time across 103 flights, 22 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 22 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 103 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 RSW to ORD
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 103 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 56.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 100 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- RSW to ORD, every carrier
- Southwest on ORD to RSW, the return leg
- United Airlines on RSW to ORD80.7%
- American Airlines on RSW to ORD74.3%
- Spirit Airlines on RSW to ORD70.1%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Southwest Florida International (RSW) delay statistics
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
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.