Carrier route record

WNSJU→MCO

Southwest Airlines · San Juan to Orlando

Flights: 2,067
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 34%
Carriers: 4

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

Southwest on SJU to MCO lands a B+, 4 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. Roughly one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by roughly 45 minutes on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 2,067 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Frontier Airlines, flew 1,240 at 78.9% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Southwest's SJU to MCO record is 4 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 40 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

81.6%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,051 completed flights

Avg delay

47 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.53%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

78.9%

Every carrier on SJU to MCO, 6,048 flights

These figures cover 2,067 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 2 minutes early, which is the part an average hides: most flights here are fine, and the on-time rate is decided by a tail of badly late ones. On-time means under 15 minutes late, the DOT's own threshold.

Carrier by carrier

Southwest against every carrier on SJU to MCO

Southwest flew 2,067 of the 6,048 flights on SJU to MCO, about 34% of it. Its 81.6% on time is 3 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 78.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 81.6% to JetBlue at 76.9%.

The three carriers here are closely matched: 2 points separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.

On-time performance by carrier on SJU to MCO
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Southwest Airlines (this page)	2,067	81.6%	47 min	0.53%	B+
Frontier Airlines	1,240	78.9%	138 min	1.37%	B
Spirit Airlines	611	77.1%	78 min	1.80%	B
JetBlue Airways	2,130	76.9%	72 min	1.03%	B

No carrier stands out. Frontier tops the table at 78.9%, 2 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.

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 28 points, against 2 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am511 flights92.9%
8am–11am302 flights94.7%
11am–2pm342 flights86.1%
2pm–5pm402 flights68.3%
5pm–8pm286 flights66.8%
8pm–5am224 flights73.9%

Scale runs 60% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 94.7% of the time, against 66.8% for the evening window. That is 28 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 511 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Southwest on SJU to MCO through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.November best, February worst

February is the weak month at 69.4% on time, against 95.5% in November. 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. July was the busiest month here, with 248 flights.

Across the week, Friday is the strongest day at 86.9% on time and Sunday the weakest at 73.6%. 13 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 57% of the 18,000 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
57%
Carrier
30%
National Airspace System
12%
Extreme weather
1%

57% 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 18,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 57 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 17,768 reported delay minutes.

The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 94.7% on time here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.53%, 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

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.6% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. Connections built on this flight are about as safe as US domestic connections get, though a cancelled flight still ignores every layover you give it.

The 1,188 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 69.8% on time across 2,067 flights, 12 points below 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 12 points of difference.

The sample behind these figures is 2,067 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.

What to do with this

Booking Southwest on SJU to MCO

Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. November runs 95.5% on time and February 69.4%, a swing of 26 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of February before you think about anything else. 2,051 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