Carrier route record
F9MCO→DFW
Frontier Airlines · Orlando to Dallas-Fort Worth
- Flights
- 733
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 15%
- 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 DFW lands a B, 2 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about an hour on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 733 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 3,630 at 72.8% on time.
The US average over the same twelve months is 77.6%, so there is little to separate Frontier on MCO to DFW from the country as a whole. The variation that matters here is internal: which carrier, and what time of day.
Key figures
On time
79.2%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 720 completed flights
Avg delay
60 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.36%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
73.4%
Every carrier on MCO to DFW, 4,911 flights
These figures cover 733 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 12 minutes early, which is the part an average hides: most flights here are fine, and the on-time rate is decided by a tail of badly late ones. On-time means under 15 minutes late, the DOT's own threshold.
Carrier by carrier
Frontier against every carrier on MCO to DFW
Frontier flew 733 of the 4,911 flights on MCO to DFW, about 15% of it. Its 79.2% on time is 6 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 73.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Frontier at 79.2% to Spirit at 69.5%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 3 points 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frontier Airlines (this page) | 733 | 79.2% | 60 min | 1.36% | B |
| Envoy Airthin sample | 36 | 75.0% | 48 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| American Airlines | 3,630 | 72.8% | 90 min | 3.09% | C− |
| Spirit Airlines | 512 | 69.5% | 71 min | 3.32% | C− |
Spirit Airlines cancels 3.3% 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 19 points, against 3 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am222 flights89.5%
- 8am–11am187 flights82.2%
- 11am–2pm83 flights72.5%
- 2pm–5pm172 flights70.2%
- 5pm–8pm56 flights74.5%
- 8pm–5am13 flights—
Scale runs 60% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 89.5% of the time, against 70.2% for the afternoon window. That is 19 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 222 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Frontier on MCO to DFW through the year
June is the worst month at 69.0% on time, 21 points below May, the best at 89.8%. 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. June was the busiest month here, with 90 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 86.8% on time and Saturday the weakest at 73.1%. 14 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 8,956 reported delay minutes.
- 36%Late-arriving aircraft
- 34%National Airspace System
- 22%Carrier
- 8%Extreme weather
36% 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 8,956 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 4 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 8,956 reported delay minutes.
34% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 3,037 minutes out of 8,956, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations sit at 1.36% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.41%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
6.1% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last about an hour, which a normal layover absorbs.
The 985 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 74.1% on time across 731 flights, 5 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 5 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 733 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 MCO to DFW
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 733 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 79.2% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 720 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- MCO to DFW, every carrier
- Frontier on DFW to MCO, the return leg
- American Airlines on MCO to DFW72.8%
- Spirit Airlines on MCO to DFW69.5%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Orlando International (MCO) delay statistics
- Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.