Carrier route record
F9DEN→SNA
Frontier Airlines · Denver to Santa Ana
- Flights
- 292
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 8%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on DEN to SNA earns an A+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 9 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 292 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 1,870 at 84.8% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Frontier's DEN to SNA record is 9 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 93 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
86.9%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 291 completed flights
Avg delay
58 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.34%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
80.1%
Every carrier on DEN to SNA, 3,696 flights
These figures cover 292 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.
Carrier by carrier
Frontier against every carrier on DEN to SNA
Frontier flew 292 of the 3,696 flights on DEN to SNA, about 8% of it. Its 86.9% on time is 7 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 80.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Frontier at 86.9% to Southwest at 73.1%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. United Airlines arrives on time 84.8% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 73.1%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,534 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample | 292 | 86.9% | 58 min | 0.34% | A+ |
| United Airlines | 1,870 | 84.8% | 49 min | 0.32% | B+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 1,534 | 73.1% | 44 min | 0.39% | C+ |
United leads Southwest by 12 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.
Flight by flight
Frontier flight numbers on DEN to SNA
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 18 points, against 12 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am31 flights100.0%
- 8am–11am216 flights86.0%
- 11am–2pm45 flights82.2%
- 2pm–5pm—
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 75% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 82.2% on time against 100.0% for 5am–8am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 216 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Frontier on DEN to SNA through the year
- Jul–Sep 202586 flights79.1%
- Oct–Dec 202586 flights85.9%
- Jan–Mar 202660 flights90.0%
- Apr–Jun 202660 flights96.7%
Scale runs 70% to 100%. 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 86.9% on time across 292 flights.
Frontier on DEN to SNA did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Apr–Jun 2026 at 96.7% on time and its weakest Jul–Sep 2025 at 79.1%, a swing of 18 points on roughly 73 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.
Across the week, Sunday is the strongest day at 90.4% on time and Monday the weakest at 84.0%. 6 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 45% of the 2,217 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.
- 45%Late-arriving aircraft
- 39%Carrier
- 15%National Airspace System
- 1%Extreme weather
45% 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 2,217 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 32 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 2,217 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 39%, 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 868 of the 2,217 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.34%, 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 stage length
What a delay here costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.5% 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.
The 846 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.
The return leg runs 84.9% on time across 292 flights, within 2 points 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. 292 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 DEN to SNA
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 292 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 86.9% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 291 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DEN to SNA, every carrier
- Frontier on SNA to DEN, the return leg
- United Airlines on DEN to SNA84.8%
- Southwest Airlines on DEN to SNA73.1%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- John Wayne Airport (SNA) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
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.