Carrier route record

F9CMH→DEN

Frontier Airlines · Columbus to Denver

Flights: 125
Period: September 2025 to August 2026
Share of route: 7%
Carriers: 3

Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.

Frontier on CMH to DEN sits in the middle of the pack with a C+. About seven flights in ten arrive on time by the DOT's definition, 6 points worse than the national rate of 77.3%. The late ones land a little over an hour behind schedule. That rests on 125 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 728 at 81.6% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so Frontier on CMH to DEN runs 6 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 63 extra late arrivals.

On time

71.0%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 124 completed flights

Avg delay

77 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.00%

National rate is 1.89%

Whole route

79.4%

Every carrier on CMH to DEN, 1,776 flights

These figures cover 125 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.7% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.

Fare search by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.

Carrier by carrier

Frontier against every carrier on CMH to DEN

Frontier flew 125 of the 1,776 flights on CMH to DEN, about 7% of it. Its 71.0% on time is 8 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 79.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 81.6% to Frontier at 71.0%.

The two carriers here are closely matched: 3 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 CMH to DEN
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
United Airlines	728	81.6%	72 min	0.82%	B+
Southwest Airlines	923	78.8%	68 min	0.54%	B+
Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample	125	71.0%	77 min	0.00%	C+

No carrier stands out. United tops the table at 81.6%, 3 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.

Timetable by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.

Departure window

When Frontier runs best on this route

Departure time is the single lever a traveller controls, and it moves the odds more than most people expect. Each bar below is the on-time rate for flights scheduled to leave inside that window, across 125 flights.

5am–8am—
8am–11am—
11am–2pm1 flights—
2pm–5pm30 flights—
5pm–8pm36 flights69.4%
8pm–5am58 flights72.4%

Scale runs 60% to 80%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 8pm–5am window is the strongest at 72.4% on time. The full set of windows spans 3 points.

Across the year

Frontier on CMH to DEN through the year

Jul–Sep 202512 flights—
Oct–Dec 202530 flights70.0%
Jan–Mar 202620 flights—
Apr–Jun 202636 flights77.8%
Jul–Sep 202627 flights—

Scale runs 60% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 71.0% on time across 125 flights.

Split by quarter, Frontier on CMH to DEN logged 12 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 30 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 20 flights in Jan–Mar 2026, 36 flights in Apr–Jun 2026 and 27 flights in Jul–Sep 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 71.0% annual figure is the one to use.

Across the week, Friday is the strongest day at 70.6% on time and Monday the weakest at 62.9%, a spread of 8 points.

Arrival by arrival

How late Frontier on CMH to DEN runs when it is late

Frontier on CMH to DEN often beats the schedule: 42 of 124 completed flights, 34%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 36 late arrivals split 16 under half an hour, 8 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 12 an hour or more.

15+ min early42 flights33.9%
Within 15 min46 flights37.1%
15–29 min late16 flights12.9%
30–59 min late8 flights6.5%
1–2 hours late10 flights8.1%
2+ hours late2 flights1.6%

Scale runs 0% to 100%.

Share of 124 completed flights by arrival against schedule.

4 of 33 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 12% of them. In the other direction, 7 flights left on time yet arrived 15 minutes late or more, so that delay built up after pushback: in the air, in a holding pattern or on the ground at DEN.

The worst days

Worst days for Frontier on CMH to DEN

The latest arrival of the period was on 1 June 2026, 16 hours 40 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. The same cause led on four of the five worst days.

The latest arrivals of Frontier on CMH to DEN in the period
Date	Arrived late by	Largest filed cause
1 June 2026	16 hours 40 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
29 July 2026	2 hours 37 minutes	National Airspace System
17 April 2026	1 hour 46 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
12 March 2026	1 hour 44 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
19 January 2026	1 hour 38 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft

Delay causes

Why Frontier runs late on this route

Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 67% of the 2,773 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.

Late-arriving aircraft
67%
National Airspace System
27%
Carrier
6%

67% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 2,773 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 67 to one. The split is drawn from 2,773 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations are rare at 0.00%, below the national 1.89% 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 stage length

What a delay here costs

9.7% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.

The 1,154 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.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 80.8% on time across 125 flights, 10 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 10 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 125 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 CMH to DEN

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 125 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 71.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 124 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated 22 October 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.

Key figures