Flight number record

F9 1261

Frontier Airlines · Denver to Ontario

Route: DEN → ONT
Departs: 22:29
Flights: 264
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s F9 1261, check with Frontier Airlines.

F9 1261 lands a B+, 5 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six 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 264 flights, with a median arrival 9 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, F9 1261's record is 5 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 50 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

82.6%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 264 completed flights

Avg delay

68 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.00%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

6.1%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 264 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 9 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.

Schedule

When F9 1261 flies

F9 1261 flies DEN to ONT without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 22:29, used on 104 of 264 flights, with 07:49 (38 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 22:29104 flights39.4%
Departs 07:4938 flights14.4%

Scale runs 0% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Share of scheduled departures at each local time. Times used on fewer than one flight in ten are not listed.

A 22:29 departure sits in the 8pm–5am window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 70.5%, and F9 1261 runs 12 points better at 82.6%. By that time of day most aircraft have flown several legs already, and whatever went wrong earlier is still in the schedule.

Against the route

F9 1261 next to DEN to ONT

Every carrier on DEN to ONT combined arrived on time 73.4% of the time across 2,671 flights, so F9 1261 is 9 points ahead of it. Frontier flew 551 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 79.1% on time. Across its whole network Frontier Airlines managed 73.2%, which this flight beats by 9 points.

F9 1261 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
F9 1261thin sample	264	82.6%	68 min	0.00%	B+
All Frontier Airlines on DEN–ONT	551	79.1%	62 min	0.36%	B+
All carriers on DEN–ONT	2,671	73.4%	56 min	0.15%	C+
Frontier Airlines, whole network	205,332	73.2%	84 min	1.85%	C

Across the year

F9 1261 quarter by quarter

F9 1261 did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jul–Sep 2025 at 93.2% on time and its weakest Apr–Jun 2026 at 69.2%, a swing of 24 points on roughly 66 flights a quarter. The twelve-month rate averages over that, so if you are flying in a weak quarter the quarter's own figure is the better guide.

Jul–Sep 202573 flights93.2%
Oct–Dec 202551 flights92.2%
Jan–Mar 202649 flights81.6%
Apr–Jun 202691 flights69.2%

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

By weekday, F9 1261 did best on Wednesday at 87.9% on time and worst on Monday at 73.2%. Each day rests on about 38 flights, so a gap of 15 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.

Delay causes

Why F9 1261 runs late

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 60% of the 3,132 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.

Carrier
60%
Late-arriving aircraft
27%
National Airspace System
10%
Extreme weather
2%

The largest share of delay minutes, 60%, 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 1,892 of the 3,132 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 3,132 delay minutes reported on F9 1261.

Cancellations are rare at 0.00%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Almost no flights are called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.

Connections and routes

What a delay on this flight costs

6.1% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last a little over an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.

The 819 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.

Every one of the 264 flights under F9 1261 in the data flew DEN to ONT. The number was not reused on any other city pair, which makes this a clean record of one route.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 264 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 F9 1261

For a booking, read F9 1261 as 82.6% on time with 0.00% cancelled over 264 flights. Those are rates from the past twelve months, not a forecast for any particular day.

Where to go next

A flight number here means Frontier Airlines’s own number as it reports to the DOT. How the figures are computed is on the methodology page.

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