Carrier route record
F9DFW→IND
Frontier Airlines · Dallas-Fort Worth to Indianapolis
- Flights
- 110
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 5%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on DFW to IND earns a B+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 7 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 110 flights, with a median arrival 13 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, Frontier's DFW to IND record is 7 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 69 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
84.5%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 110 completed flights
Avg delay
79 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.00%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
68.6%
Every carrier on DFW to IND, 2,047 flights
These figures cover 110 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 13 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 DFW to IND
Frontier flew 110 of the 2,047 flights on DFW to IND, about 5% of it. Its 84.5% on time is 16 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 68.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number four of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from PSA at 100.0% to American at 67.1%. Three of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA Airlinesthin sample | 5 | 100.0% | — | 20.00% | A− |
| Spirit Airlinesthin sample | 35 | 91.4% | 48 min | 0.00% | A+ |
| Envoy Airthin sample | 11 | 90.9% | 28 min | 0.00% | A+ |
| Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample | 110 | 84.5% | 79 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| American Airlines | 1,886 | 67.1% | 70 min | 3.02% | C− |
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 110 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Frontier's DFW to IND record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 84.5% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
Frontier on DFW to IND through the year
- Jul–Sep 202530 flights86.7%
- Oct–Dec 202536 flights80.6%
- Jan–Mar 202622 flights—
- Apr–Jun 202622 flights—
Scale runs 70% to 90%. 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 84.5% on time across 110 flights.
Split by quarter, Frontier on DFW to IND logged 30 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 36 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 22 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 22 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 84.5% annual figure is the one to use.
Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 92.3% on time and Friday the weakest at 81.1%. 11 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 1,336 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
- 26%Extreme weather
- 16%National Airspace System
- 7%Carrier
Extreme weather accounts for 26% of delay minutes, well above the single-digit share typical across the system. Weather delays are lumpy: they arrive as whole bad days rather than as a steady drag, so the monthly strip above is the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 4.1 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 1,336 reported delay minutes.
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 1,336 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 2 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.
Cancellations are rare at 0.00%, below the national 1.81% 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
6.4% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last a little over an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
The 761 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 is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 76.4% on time across 110 flights, 8 points below 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 8 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 110 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 DFW to IND
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 110 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 84.5% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 110 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DFW to IND, every carrier
- Frontier on IND to DFW, the return leg
- American Airlines on DFW to IND67.1%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW) delay statistics
- Indianapolis International (IND) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- Late aircraft, weather, or the airline: what actually causes US flight delays
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.