Carrier route record

F9MSY→ATL

Frontier Airlines · New Orleans to Atlanta

Flights: 232
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 6%
Carriers: 5

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.

Frontier on MSY to ATL earns a D, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 56.8% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 21 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average a little over an hour. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 232 flights, with a median arrival 9 minutes late.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Frontier on MSY to ATL runs 21 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 208 extra late arrivals.

On time

56.8%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 229 completed flights

Avg delay

74 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.29%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

83.3%

Every carrier on MSY to ATL, 4,056 flights

These figures cover 232 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 16.2% 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 MSY to ATL

Frontier flew 232 of the 4,056 flights on MSY to ATL, about 6% of it. Its 56.8% on time is 27 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 83.3%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from American at 100.0% to Frontier at 56.8%. Three of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.

Only one carrier clears this site's 365-flight floor here, so there is no comparison to draw. The table below is the full picture.

On-time performance by carrier on MSY to ATL
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
American Airlinesthin sample	2	100.0%	—	0.00%	A+
Delta Air Lines	3,278	87.3%	65 min	1.59%	A
Spirit Airlinesthin sample	183	70.8%	86 min	2.73%	C
Southwest Airlinesthin sample	361	70.8%	46 min	0.28%	C+
Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample	232	56.8%	74 min	1.29%	D

Departure window

When Frontier runs best on this route

Departure time is the single lever a traveller controls, and it moves the odds more than most people expect. Each bar below is the on-time rate for flights scheduled to leave inside that window, across 232 flights.

5am–8am11 flights—
8am–11am2 flights—
11am–2pm39 flights57.9%
2pm–5pm10 flights—
5pm–8pm168 flights56.0%
8pm–5am2 flights—

Scale runs 50% to 65%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

The 11am–2pm window is the strongest at 57.9% on time. The full set of windows spans 2 points.

Across the year

Frontier on MSY to ATL through the year

Jul–Sep 202534 flights55.9%
Oct–Dec 202545 flights63.6%
Jan–Mar 202671 flights62.0%
Apr–Jun 202682 flights48.8%

Scale runs 40% to 70%. 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 56.8% on time across 232 flights.

Frontier on MSY to ATL did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Oct–Dec 2025 at 63.6% on time and its weakest Apr–Jun 2026 at 48.8%, a swing of 15 points on roughly 58 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, Thursday is the strongest day at 63.5% on time and Sunday the weakest at 48.1%. 15 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 67% of the 7,342 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
67%
National Airspace System
23%
Carrier
10%
Extreme weather
0%

67% 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 7,342 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 67 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 7,342 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations sit at 1.29% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.

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. 16.2% 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 425 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 11am–2pm window matters as much as it does.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 63.6% on time across 231 flights, 7 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 7 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 232 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 MSY to ATL

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 232 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 56.8% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 229 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