Carrier route record

F9DTW→FLL

Frontier Airlines · Detroit to Fort Lauderdale

Flights: 147
Period: September 2025 to August 2026
Share of route: 5%
Carriers: 4

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

Frontier on DTW to FLL draws a D−. Roughly one flight in two arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is about an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 147 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 1,808 at 73.6% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.3%, so Frontier on DTW to FLL runs 18 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 176 extra late arrivals.

On time

59.7%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 139 completed flights

Avg delay

61 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

5.44%

National rate is 1.89%

Whole route

71.5%

Every carrier on DTW to FLL, 2,692 flights

These figures cover 147 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 14.4% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.

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Carrier by carrier

Frontier against every carrier on DTW to FLL

Frontier flew 147 of the 2,692 flights on DTW to FLL, about 5% of it. Its 59.7% on time is 12 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 71.5%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from JetBlue at 77.2% to Frontier at 59.7%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Delta Air Lines arrives on time 73.6% of the time; Spirit Airlines manages 66.8%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 630 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on DTW to FLL
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
JetBlue Airwaysthin sample	107	77.2%	95 min	4.67%	B−
Delta Air Lines	1,808	73.6%	69 min	1.66%	C
Spirit Airlines	630	66.8%	68 min	3.17%	C−
Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample	147	59.7%	61 min	5.44%	D−

Spirit Airlines cancels 3.2% of what it schedules here, the highest in the table. A cancelled flight never appears in an on-time rate, so read that column alongside the punctuality one rather than after it.

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 147 flights.

5am–8am13 flights—
8am–11am63 flights55.0%
11am–2pm8 flights—
2pm–5pm62 flights56.9%
5pm–8pm1 flights—
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 45% to 60%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 2pm–5pm window is the strongest at 56.9% on time. The full set of windows spans 2 points.

Across the year

Frontier on DTW to FLL through the year

Oct–Dec 202515 flights—
Jan–Mar 202651 flights44.9%
Apr–Jun 202623 flights—
Jul–Sep 202658 flights64.8%

Scale runs 35% to 70%. 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 59.7% on time across 147 flights.

Split by quarter, Frontier on DTW to FLL logged 15 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 51 flights in Jan–Mar 2026, 23 flights in Apr–Jun 2026 and 58 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 59.7% annual figure is the one to use.

Arrival by arrival

How late Frontier on DTW to FLL runs when it is late

The 56 late arrivals split 20 under half an hour, 16 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 20 an hour or more.

15+ min early17 flights12.2%
Within 15 min66 flights47.5%
15–29 min late20 flights14.4%
30–59 min late16 flights11.5%
1–2 hours late14 flights10.1%
2+ hours late6 flights4.3%

Scale runs 0% to 100%.

Share of 139 completed flights by arrival against schedule.

Time lost at the gate mostly stays lost. Of 43 departures that left 15 minutes late or more, only 2 made it up before arrival. In the other direction, 15 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 FLL.

The worst days

Worst days for Frontier on DTW to FLL

The latest arrival of the period was on 24 March 2026, 3 hours 49 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 DTW to FLL in the period
Date	Arrived late by	Largest filed cause
24 March 2026	3 hours 49 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
14 August 2026	3 hours 21 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
17 March 2026	3 hours 20 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft
16 February 2026	3 hours 16 minutes	Carrier
2 April 2026	2 hours 42 minutes	Late-arriving aircraft

Delay causes

Why Frontier runs late on this route

Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 56% of the 3,428 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.

Late-arriving aircraft
56%
National Airspace System
28%
Carrier
14%
Extreme weather
2%

56% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 3,428 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 28 to one. The split is drawn from 3,428 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations run at 5.44%, against 1.89% nationally. That is roughly one flight in twenty 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

14.4% 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 1,127 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 55.6% on time across 147 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 147 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 FLL

Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 5.44% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you about an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 2pm–5pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 139 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