Carrier route record
F9MCO→PHX
Frontier Airlines · Orlando to Phoenix
- Flights
- 194
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 11%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on MCO to PHX lands a B, 4 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. Roughly one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about 50 minutes on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 194 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Southwest Airlines, flew 852 at 78.2% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Frontier's MCO to PHX record is 4 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 42 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
81.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 192 completed flights
Avg delay
51 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.03%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
77.6%
Every carrier on MCO to PHX, 1,842 flights
These figures cover 194 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 14 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 PHX
Frontier flew 194 of the 1,842 flights on MCO to PHX, about 11% of it. Its 81.8% on time is 4 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 77.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Frontier at 81.8% to American at 75.9%.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 2 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)thin sample | 194 | 81.8% | 51 min | 1.03% | B |
| Southwest Airlines | 852 | 78.2% | 51 min | 0.23% | B+ |
| American Airlines | 796 | 75.9% | 104 min | 0.63% | B+ |
No carrier stands out. Southwest tops the table at 78.2%, 2 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
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 14 points, against 2 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am41 flights90.2%
- 11am–2pm21 flights—
- 2pm–5pm46 flights76.1%
- 5pm–8pm13 flights—
- 8pm–5am73 flights78.9%
Scale runs 70% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 90.2% of the time, against 76.1% for the afternoon window. That is 14 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 73 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Frontier on MCO to PHX through the year
- Jul–Sep 202535 flights77.1%
- Oct–Dec 202547 flights80.9%
- Jan–Mar 202654 flights80.8%
- Apr–Jun 202658 flights86.2%
Scale runs 70% to 90%. 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 81.8% on time across 194 flights.
Quarter by quarter Frontier on MCO to PHX held fairly steady: 77.1% in Jul–Sep 2025, 80.9% in Oct–Dec 2025, 80.8% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 86.2% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 9 points is about what a sample of this size moves on its own, so the annual figure is a fair summary.
Across the week, Thursday is the strongest day at 87.1% on time and Saturday the weakest at 76.7%. 10 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 1,784 reported delay minutes.
- 36%Late-arriving aircraft
- 34%Carrier
- 18%National Airspace System
- 12%Extreme weather
Extreme weather accounts for 12% of delay minutes, well above the single-digit share typical across the system. Weather delays are lumpy: they arrive as whole bad days rather than as a steady drag, so the monthly strip above is the more useful view of the risk. The national share is 6%, so this operation carries roughly 2.0 times the usual weather exposure. The split is drawn from 1,784 reported delay minutes.
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 1,784 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 3 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.
Cancellations sit at 1.03% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
5.2% 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 50 minutes, which a normal layover absorbs.
At 1,849 miles this is transcontinental flying, and long routes get a quiet structural advantage. Scheduled block time on a flight this length carries more padding in absolute minutes, so a twenty-minute late departure often still becomes an on-time arrival. Read the on-time rate here as slightly flattering next to a short-haul route with the same operational quality.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 76.4% on time across 195 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. 194 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 PHX
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 194 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 81.8% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 192 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- MCO to PHX, every carrier
- Frontier on PHX to MCO, the return leg
- Southwest Airlines on MCO to PHX78.2%
- American Airlines on MCO to PHX75.9%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Orlando International (MCO) delay statistics
- Phoenix Sky Harbor International (PHX) 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.