Carrier route record

NKSJU→MCO

Spirit Airlines · San Juan to Orlando

Flights: 611
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 10%
Carriers: 4

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

Spirit on SJU to MCO lands a B, level with the national rate of 77.6%. Roughly one flight in four arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by a little over an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 611 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Southwest Airlines, flew 2,067 at 81.6% on time.

Southwest Airlines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 81.6% on time across 2,067 flights.

On time

77.1%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 599 completed flights

Avg delay

78 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.80%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

78.9%

Every carrier on SJU to MCO, 6,048 flights

These figures cover 611 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.5% 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 SJU to MCO

Spirit flew 611 of the 6,048 flights on SJU to MCO, about 10% of it. Its 77.1% on time is 2 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 78.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three 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: 5 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	2,067	81.6%	47 min	0.53%	B+
Frontier Airlines	1,240	78.9%	138 min	1.37%	B
Spirit Airlines (this page)	611	77.1%	78 min	1.80%	B
JetBlue Airways	2,130	76.9%	72 min	1.03%	B

No carrier stands out. Southwest tops the table at 81.6%, 5 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.

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 19 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am137 flights85.0%
8am–11am—
11am–2pm75 flights77.3%
2pm–5pm95 flights75.8%
5pm–8pm73 flights66.2%
8pm–5am231 flights76.4%

Scale runs 60% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 85.0% of the time, against 66.2% for the evening window. That is 19 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 231 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Spirit on SJU to MCO through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.September best, March worst

September is the best month on the calendar at 85.0% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. January was the busiest month here, with 68 flights.

Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 86.4% on time and Saturday the weakest at 71.3%. 15 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Spirit runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 45% of the 11,000 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
45%
Carrier
36%
National Airspace System
19%
Extreme weather
1%
Security
0%

45% 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 11,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 45 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 10,675 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 36%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 3,794 of the 11,000 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations sit at 1.80% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.16%.

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. 9.5% 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 1,188 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 70.9% on time across 611 flights, 6 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 6 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 611 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 SJU to MCO

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 611 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 77.1% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 599 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