Flight number record

F9 3053

Frontier Airlines · Tampa to Atlanta

Route: TPA → ATL
Departs: 19:50
Flights: 266
Period: July 2025 to June 2026

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s F9 3053, check with Frontier Airlines.

F9 3053 draws a C+. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 266 flights, with a median arrival 1 minute late.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so F9 3053 runs 12 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 121 extra late arrivals.

On time

65.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 264 completed flights

Avg delay

69 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.75%

National rate is 1.81%

1 hour+ late

14.8%

National rate is 8.1%

These figures cover 266 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 14.8% 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.

Schedule

When F9 3053 flies

F9 3053 flies TPA to ATL without a single fixed slot. Its most common scheduled departure was 19:50, used on 31 of 266 flights, with 19:26 (30 flights) and 16:46 (29 flights) next. Carriers retime flights through the season, so the rates here blend slightly different positions in the aircraft's day.

Departs 19:5031 flights11.7%
Departs 19:2630 flights11.3%
Departs 16:4629 flights10.9%

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 19:50 departure sits in the 5pm–8pm window. Across every US flight scheduled in that window the on-time rate is 68.2%, and F9 3053 runs 3 points worse at 65.5%. 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 3053 next to TPA to ATL

Every carrier on TPA to ATL combined arrived on time 79.9% of the time across 6,138 flights, so F9 3053 is 14 points behind it. Frontier flew 867 flights on the same city pair under all its flight numbers, including this one, and those ran 73.5% on time. Across its whole network Frontier Airlines managed 73.2%, which this flight trails by 8 points.

F9 3053 against its route and carrier
Compared with	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
F9 3053thin sample	266	65.5%	69 min	0.75%	C+
All Frontier Airlines on TPA–ATL	867	73.5%	61 min	1.50%	C
All carriers on TPA–ATL	6,138	79.9%	71 min	1.25%	B
Frontier Airlines, whole network	205,332	73.2%	84 min	1.85%	C

Across the year

F9 3053 quarter by quarter

F9 3053 did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Oct–Dec 2025 at 70.7% on time and its weakest Jan–Mar 2026 at 56.9%, a swing of 14 points on roughly 67 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 202560 flights62.7%
Oct–Dec 202558 flights70.7%
Jan–Mar 202666 flights56.9%
Apr–Jun 202682 flights70.7%

Scale runs 50% to 75%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

By weekday, F9 3053 did best on Thursday at 69.6% on time and worst on Sunday at 55.3%. Each day rests on about 38 flights, so a gap of 14 points is worth noticing but could still narrow in another year.

Delay causes

Why F9 3053 runs late

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 6,236 reported delay minutes.

National Airspace System
40%
Late-arriving aircraft
40%
Carrier
18%
Extreme weather
2%

40% 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 6,236 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 17 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 6,236 delay minutes reported on F9 3053.

Cancellations are rare at 0.75%, 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 routes

What a delay on this flight costs

For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 14.8% 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.

Every one of the 266 flights under F9 3053 in the data flew TPA to ATL. 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. 266 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 3053

For a booking, F9 3053 is a flight to put a long connection behind. 14.8% of its completed flights arrived an hour or more late, which a short layover will not absorb. If the onward flight is on a separate ticket, the risk sits with you.

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