Carrier route record
F9MCO→ATL
Frontier Airlines · Orlando to Atlanta
- Flights
- 1,180
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 14%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on MCO to ATL draws a C. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 1,180 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 5,463 at 79.1% on time.
Delta Air Lines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 79.1% on time across 5,463 flights.
Key figures
On time
67.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,161 completed flights
Avg delay
74 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.53%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
75.6%
Every carrier on MCO to ATL, 8,207 flights
These figures cover 1,180 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 12.0% 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 MCO to ATL
Frontier flew 1,180 of the 8,207 flights on MCO to ATL, about 14% of it. Its 67.7% on time is 8 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 75.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 79.1% to Spirit at 64.5%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Delta Air Lines arrives on time 79.1% of the time; Spirit Airlines manages 64.5%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 471 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delta Air Lines | 5,463 | 79.1% | 88 min | 1.24% | B |
| Southwest Airlines | 1,093 | 71.3% | 59 min | 1.37% | C |
| Frontier Airlines (this page) | 1,180 | 67.7% | 74 min | 1.53% | C |
| Spirit Airlines | 471 | 64.5% | 68 min | 2.97% | D |
The spread between Delta and Spirit is 15 points, wide enough that it should decide the booking. On a hundred trips that is 15 more arrivals inside the on-time window.
Flight by flight
Frontier flight numbers on MCO 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 31 points, against 15 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am248 flights89.7%
- 8am–11am197 flights63.3%
- 11am–2pm184 flights65.9%
- 2pm–5pm120 flights61.9%
- 5pm–8pm250 flights60.4%
- 8pm–5am181 flights58.4%
Scale runs 50% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 8pm–5am window is where this operation falls apart: 58.4% on time, against 89.7% for the 5am–8am 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 250 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Frontier on MCO to ATL through the year
June is the worst month at 52.7% on time, 30 points below September, the best at 82.6%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. April was the busiest month here, with 123 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 80.6% on time and Sunday the weakest at 57.3%. 23 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Frontier runs late on this route
Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 28,000 reported delay minutes.
- 41%Late-arriving aircraft
- 31%National Airspace System
- 24%Carrier
- 4%Extreme weather
41% 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 28,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 9 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 27,776 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 89.7% on time here.
Cancellations sit at 1.53% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.08%.
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. 12.0% 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.
At 404 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.
The return leg runs 65.6% on time across 1,181 flights, within 2 points of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
The sample behind these figures is 1,180 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.
What to do with this
Booking Frontier on MCO to ATL
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. September runs 82.6% on time and June 52.7%, a swing of 30 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of June before you think about anything else. 1,161 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- MCO to ATL, every carrier
- Frontier on ATL to MCO, the return leg
- Delta Air Lines on MCO to ATL79.1%
- Southwest Airlines on MCO to ATL71.3%
- Spirit Airlines on MCO to ATL64.5%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Orlando International (MCO) delay statistics
- Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL) delay statistics
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
- 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.