Carrier route record
F9DTW→DFW
Frontier Airlines · Detroit to Dallas-Fort Worth
- Flights
- 227
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 6%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on DTW to DFW draws a D−. Roughly one flight in two arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is an hour and a half behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 227 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 1,405 at 76.3% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Frontier on DTW to DFW runs 18 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 178 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
59.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 219 completed flights
Avg delay
85 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
3.52%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
75.3%
Every carrier on DTW to DFW, 3,509 flights
These figures cover 227 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 16.4% 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 DTW to DFW
Frontier flew 227 of the 3,509 flights on DTW to DFW, about 6% of it. Its 59.8% on time is 16 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 75.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Envoy at 94.7% to Frontier at 59.8%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two carriers here are closely matched: half 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envoy Airthin sample | 19 | 94.7% | 136 min | 0.00% | A+ |
| Spirit Airlinesthin sample | 237 | 77.7% | 62 min | 1.27% | B |
| Delta Air Lines | 1,405 | 76.3% | 57 min | 1.71% | B |
| American Airlines | 1,621 | 75.9% | 92 min | 2.71% | B |
| Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample | 227 | 59.8% | 85 min | 3.52% | D− |
No carrier stands out. Delta tops the table at 76.3%, half a point clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
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 39 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am9 flights—
- 8am–11am6 flights—
- 11am–2pm44 flights76.7%
- 2pm–5pm32 flights67.7%
- 5pm–8pm78 flights63.6%
- 8pm–5am58 flights37.7%
Scale runs 30% to 80%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 37.7% on time, against 76.7% for the 11am–2pm 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 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 78 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Frontier on DTW to DFW through the year
- Jul–Sep 202555 flights73.6%
- Oct–Dec 202560 flights54.2%
- Jan–Mar 202637 flights54.3%
- Apr–Jun 202675 flights56.9%
Scale runs 45% to 80%. 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 59.8% on time across 227 flights.
Frontier on DTW to DFW did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jul–Sep 2025 at 73.6% on time and its weakest Oct–Dec 2025 at 54.2%, a swing of 19 points on roughly 57 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, Thursday is the strongest day at 70.7% on time and Monday the weakest at 45.0%. 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 65% of the 7,438 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.
- 65%Late-arriving aircraft
- 18%National Airspace System
- 16%Carrier
- 0%Extreme weather
65% 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 7,438 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 65 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 7,438 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations run at 3.52%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in 30 cancelled outright. A cancelled flight is invisible in every on-time figure on this page, so the punctuality numbers above describe only the flights that actually operated.
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. 16.4% 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.
The 986 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 79.8% on time across 227 flights, 20 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 20 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 227 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 DTW to DFW
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 3.52% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 11am–2pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 219 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- DTW to DFW, every carrier
- Frontier on DFW to DTW, the return leg
- Spirit Airlines on DTW to DFW77.7%
- Delta Air Lines on DTW to DFW76.3%
- American Airlines on DTW to DFW75.9%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County (DTW) delay statistics
- Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
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.