Carrier route record
F9DEN→XNA
Frontier Airlines · Denver to Bentonville
- Flights
- 150
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 11%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on DEN to XNA lands a B+, 6 points better than the national rate of 77.3%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about 55 minutes on average. That rests on 150 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, SkyWest Airlines, flew 826 at 84.5% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Frontier's DEN to XNA record is 6 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 60 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
83.3%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 150 completed flights
Avg delay
54 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.00%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
82.0%
Every carrier on DEN to XNA, 1,346 flights
These figures cover 150 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. The median arrival is 11 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.
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Carrier by carrier
Frontier against every carrier on DEN to XNA
Frontier flew 150 of the 1,346 flights on DEN to XNA, about 11% of it. Its 83.3% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 82.0%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 84.5% to United at 75.9%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. SkyWest Airlines arrives on time 84.5% of the time; United Airlines manages 75.9%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 370 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyWest Airlines | 826 | 84.5% | 61 min | 0.73% | B+ |
| Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample | 150 | 83.3% | 54 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| United Airlines | 370 | 75.9% | 74 min | 0.27% | B+ |
SkyWest leads United by 9 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.
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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 150 flights.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am55 flights87.3%
- 11am–2pm38 flights78.9%
- 2pm–5pm57 flights82.5%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 70% to 95%. 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 78.9% on time against 87.3% for 8am–11am. 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 2pm–5pm window is the busiest, with 57 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Frontier on DEN to XNA through the year
- Jul–Sep 202517 flights—
- Oct–Dec 202545 flights80.0%
- Jan–Mar 202618 flights—
- Apr–Jun 202637 flights91.9%
- Jul–Sep 202633 flights78.8%
Scale runs 70% to 95%. 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 83.3% on time across 150 flights.
Frontier on DEN to XNA did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Apr–Jun 2026 at 91.9% on time and its weakest Jul–Sep 2026 at 78.8%, a swing of 13 points on roughly 50 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 87.9% on time and Thursday the weakest at 77.4%, a spread of 11 points.
Arrival by arrival
How late Frontier on DEN to XNA runs when it is late
Frontier on DEN to XNA often beats the schedule: 54 of 150 completed flights, 36%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 25 late arrivals split 11 under half an hour, 4 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 10 an hour or more.
- 15+ min early54 flights36.0%
- Within 15 min71 flights47.3%
- 15–29 min late11 flights7.3%
- 30–59 min late4 flights2.7%
- 1–2 hours late8 flights5.3%
- 2+ hours late2 flights1.3%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 150 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
5 of 29 late departures made up the time and arrived on time, 17% of them. Only 1 left on time and still arrived late.
The worst days
Worst days for Frontier on DEN to XNA
The latest arrival of the period was on 5 October 2025, 2 hours 45 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as carrier-caused (crew, maintenance, fuelling, baggage). The five worst days are spread across October, September, March and December, with no single month standing out.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 5 October 2025 | 2 hours 45 minutes | Carrier |
| 29 September 2025 | 2 hours 8 minutes | Extreme weather |
| 15 October 2025 | 1 hour 47 minutes | Carrier |
| 23 March 2026 | 1 hour 42 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 22 December 2025 | 1 hour 29 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
Delay causes
Why Frontier runs late on this route
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 1,359 reported delay minutes.
- 41%Late-arriving aircraft
- 39%Carrier
- 10%Extreme weather
- 9%National Airspace System
41% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 1,359 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 4 to one. The split is drawn from 1,359 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 39%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 536 of the 1,359 delay minutes reported here.
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
6.7% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.3%, so a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last about 55 minutes, which a normal layover absorbs.
The 616 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 runs 82.0% on time across 150 flights, within about a point 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. 150 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 XNA
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 150 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 83.3% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 150 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DEN to XNA, every carrier
- Frontier on XNA to DEN, the return leg
- SkyWest Airlines on DEN to XNA84.5%
- United Airlines on DEN to XNA75.9%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Denver International (DEN) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.05 million flight records
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.