Carrier route record

NKSNA→LAS

Spirit Airlines · Santa Ana to Las Vegas

Flights: 781
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 18%
Carriers: 4

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

Spirit on SNA to LAS earns an A. Close to nine flights in ten arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 11 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs an hour and a half. That rests on 781 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, SkyWest Airlines, flew 760 at 85.9% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Spirit's SNA to LAS record is 11 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 109 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

88.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 768 completed flights

Avg delay

84 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.66%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

83.0%

Every carrier on SNA to LAS, 4,252 flights

These figures cover 781 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 8 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

Spirit against every carrier on SNA to LAS

Spirit flew 781 of the 4,252 flights on SNA to LAS, about 18% of it. Its 88.5% on time is 6 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 83.0%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Spirit at 88.5% to Frontier at 75.0%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The two 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 SNA to LAS
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Spirit Airlines (this page)	781	88.5%	84 min	1.66%	A
SkyWest Airlines	760	85.9%	98 min	0.79%	A+
Southwest Airlines	2,498	81.0%	53 min	0.44%	B+
Frontier Airlinesthin sample	213	75.0%	93 min	0.47%	B+

No carrier stands out. SkyWest tops the table at 85.9%, 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 23 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am297 flights94.9%
8am–11am52 flights91.8%
11am–2pm158 flights88.3%
2pm–5pm142 flights81.4%
5pm–8pm37 flights72.2%
8pm–5am95 flights84.2%

Scale runs 65% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 94.9% of the time, against 72.2% for the evening window. That is 23 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 297 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Spirit on SNA to LAS through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.December best, July worst

July is the worst month at 80.0% on time, 17 points below December, the best at 97.3%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. July was the busiest month here, with 101 flights.

Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 92.5% on time and Friday the weakest at 83.2%. 9 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. National Airspace System accounts for 45% of the 7,371 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.

National Airspace System
45%
Late-arriving aircraft
39%
Carrier
15%
Extreme weather
1%

39% 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 7,371 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 39 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 7,371 reported delay minutes.

45% 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 3,302 minutes out of 7,371, against a national NAS share of 21%.

Cancellations sit at 1.66% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.3% 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.

At 226 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.

The return leg runs 87.5% on time across 780 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. 781 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 SNA to LAS

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 781 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 88.5% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 768 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