Carrier route record

F9FLL→PHL

Frontier Airlines · Fort Lauderdale to Philadelphia

Flights: 577
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 17%
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 PHL draws a D. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is close to two hours behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 577 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 1,449 at 77.6% on time.

American Airlines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 77.6% on time across 1,449 flights.

On time

64.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 561 completed flights

Avg delay

107 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

2.60%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

73.2%

Every carrier on FLL to PHL, 3,410 flights

These figures cover 577 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 15.0% 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 PHL

Frontier flew 577 of the 3,410 flights on FLL to PHL, about 17% of it. Its 64.5% on time is 9 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 73.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from American at 77.6% to Frontier at 64.5%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. American Airlines arrives on time 77.6% of the time; Spirit Airlines manages 70.6%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 709 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on FLL to PHL
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
American Airlines	1,449	77.6%	114 min	2.76%	B
JetBlue Airways	675	73.8%	66 min	1.78%	C
Spirit Airlines	709	70.6%	72 min	4.80%	C−
Frontier Airlines (this page)	577	64.5%	107 min	2.60%	D

Spirit Airlines cancels 4.8% 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.

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 27 points, against 7 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am12 flights—
8am–11am90 flights78.7%
11am–2pm193 flights66.1%
2pm–5pm47 flights55.6%
5pm–8pm47 flights52.2%
8pm–5am188 flights60.6%

Scale runs 45% to 85%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 52.2% on time, against 78.7% for the 8am–11am 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 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 193 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Frontier on FLL to PHL through the year

Jul–Sep 202565 flights74.6%
Oct–Dec 2025125 flights75.6%
Jan–Mar 2026207 flights54.5%
Apr–Jun 2026180 flights64.4%

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 64.5% on time across 577 flights.

Frontier on FLL to PHL did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Oct–Dec 2025 at 75.6% on time and its weakest Jan–Mar 2026 at 54.5%, a swing of 21 points on roughly 144 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, Monday is the strongest day at 74.4% on time and Sunday the weakest at 54.9%. 20 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 69% of the 21,000 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.

Late-arriving aircraft
69%
Carrier
23%
National Airspace System
7%
Extreme weather
2%

69% 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 21,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 39 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 21,237 reported delay minutes.

The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 78.7% on time here.

Cancellations run at 2.60%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about 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. 15.0% 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 993 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 73.1% on time across 579 flights, 9 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 9 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 577 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 PHL

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 577 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 64.5% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 561 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.

Where to go next

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.

Key figures