Carrier route record
F9FLL→ATL
Frontier Airlines · Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta
- Flights
- 927
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 13%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on FLL to ATL draws a C. About one flight in three 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 927 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 4,268 at 78.9% on time.
Delta Air Lines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 78.9% on time across 4,268 flights.
Key figures
On time
65.0%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 901 completed flights
Avg delay
85 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
2.80%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
71.8%
Every carrier on FLL to ATL, 7,185 flights
These figures cover 927 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 16.1% 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 FLL to ATL
Frontier flew 927 of the 7,185 flights on FLL to ATL, about 13% of it. Its 65.0% on time is 7 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 71.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 78.9% to JetBlue at 56.9%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Delta Air Lines arrives on time 78.9% of the time; JetBlue Airways manages 56.9%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 647 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delta Air Lines | 4,268 | 78.9% | 74 min | 1.66% | B |
| Frontier Airlines (this page) | 927 | 65.0% | 85 min | 2.80% | C |
| Spirit Airlines | 1,343 | 60.7% | 67 min | 3.43% | D− |
| JetBlue Airways | 647 | 56.9% | 64 min | 2.94% | D |
Spirit Airlines cancels 3.4% 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.
Flight by flight
Frontier flight numbers on FLL to ATL
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 25 points, against 22 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am328 flights77.4%
- 8am–11am91 flights67.0%
- 11am–2pm75 flights52.7%
- 2pm–5pm45 flights62.2%
- 5pm–8pm260 flights54.6%
- 8pm–5am128 flights61.0%
Scale runs 45% to 85%. 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 52.7% on time against 77.4% 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 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 328 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Frontier on FLL to ATL through the year
December is the weak month at 57.1% on time, against 89.4% in September. Winter delays cluster: a single storm system can account for most of a month's shortfall, so an average December hides both very good weeks and genuinely unflyable days. March was the busiest month here, with 121 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 76.8% on time and Sunday the weakest at 56.3%. 21 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 50% of the 27,000 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.
- 50%Late-arriving aircraft
- 29%Carrier
- 19%National Airspace System
- 1%Extreme weather
50% 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 27,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 42 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 26,812 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 77.4% on time here.
Cancellations run at 2.80%, against 1.81% nationally. That is roughly one flight in 40 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. 16.1% 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 581 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 64.2% on time across 928 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. 927 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 FLL to ATL
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 2.80% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you an hour and a half; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 5am–8am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 901 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- FLL to ATL, every carrier
- Frontier on ATL to FLL, the return leg
- Delta Air Lines on FLL to ATL78.9%
- Spirit Airlines on FLL to ATL60.7%
- JetBlue Airways on FLL to ATL56.9%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International (FLL) delay statistics
- Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL) 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.