Carrier route record
F9ATL→TPA
Frontier Airlines · Atlanta to Tampa
- Flights
- 870
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 14%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on ATL to TPA draws a D. 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 870 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Southwest Airlines, flew 732 at 75.9% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Frontier on ATL to TPA runs 13 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 127 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
64.9%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 853 completed flights
Avg delay
77 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.84%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
73.3%
Every carrier on ATL to TPA, 6,141 flights
These figures cover 870 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 14.2% 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
Frontier against every carrier on ATL to TPA
Frontier flew 870 of the 6,141 flights on ATL to TPA, about 14% of it. Its 64.9% on time is 8 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 73.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 75.9% to Frontier at 64.9%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two carriers here are closely matched: about a point 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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlines | 732 | 75.9% | 68 min | 0.82% | B+ |
| Delta Air Lines | 4,413 | 74.6% | 55 min | 1.18% | C |
| Spirit Airlinesthin sample | 126 | 69.6% | 82 min | 0.79% | C+ |
| Frontier Airlines (this page) | 870 | 64.9% | 77 min | 1.84% | D |
No carrier stands out. Southwest tops the table at 75.9%, about a point clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Flight by flight
Frontier flight numbers on ATL to TPA
Departure window
When Frontier runs best on this route
Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 26 points, against about a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am56 flights83.6%
- 8am–11am129 flights67.2%
- 11am–2pm31 flights71.0%
- 2pm–5pm123 flights71.2%
- 5pm–8pm218 flights65.7%
- 8pm–5am313 flights57.1%
Scale runs 50% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 57.1% on time, against 83.6% for the 5am–8am slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 313 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Frontier on ATL to TPA through the year
July is the worst month at 45.5% on time, 38 points below September, the best at 83.1%. 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. March was the busiest month here, with 91 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 81.5% on time and Monday the weakest at 55.5%. 26 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Frontier runs late on this route
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 51% of the 23,000 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.
- 51%Late-arriving aircraft
- 35%Carrier
- 13%National Airspace System
- 1%Extreme weather
51% 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 23,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 51 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 23,132 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 35%, 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 8,136 of the 23,000 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations sit at 1.84% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.11%.
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. 14.2% 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.
At 406 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 is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 73.5% on time across 867 flights, 9 points above 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 9 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 870 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 Frontier on ATL to TPA
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 870 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 64.9% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 853 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ATL to TPA, every carrier
- Frontier on TPA to ATL, the return leg
- Southwest Airlines on ATL to TPA75.9%
- Delta Air Lines on ATL to TPA74.6%
- Spirit Airlines on ATL to TPA69.6%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL) delay statistics
- Tampa International (TPA) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- How often a connection fails at the major US hubs
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.