Carrier route record
F9ORD→BWI
Frontier Airlines · Chicago to Baltimore
- Flights
- 150
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 6%
- Carriers
- 8
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on ORD to BWI 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 150 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Envoy Air, flew 903 at 76.4% on time.
The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Frontier on ORD to BWI runs 12 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 123 extra late arrivals.
Key figures
On time
65.3%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 144 completed flights
Avg delay
80 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
4.00%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
71.9%
Every carrier on ORD to BWI, 2,696 flights
These figures cover 150 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 13.2% 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 ORD to BWI
Frontier flew 150 of the 2,696 flights on ORD to BWI, about 6% of it. Its 65.3% on time is 7 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 71.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number five of eight carriers on the route, where the range runs from Spirit at 77.8% to American at 57.7%. Five of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 5 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spirit Airlinesthin sample | 27 | 77.8% | 60 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| Envoy Air | 903 | 76.4% | 62 min | 3.77% | B− |
| United Airlines | 1,151 | 71.1% | 61 min | 1.39% | C |
| Republic Airwaysthin sample | 274 | 70.5% | 80 min | 3.65% | C− |
| Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample | 150 | 65.3% | 80 min | 4.00% | C− |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 41 | 64.1% | 81 min | 2.44% | D |
| Southwest Airlinesthin sample | 124 | 63.1% | 84 min | 1.61% | D |
| American Airlinesthin sample | 26 | 57.7% | 92 min | 0.00% | D+ |
Envoy Air cancels 3.8% 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 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 150 flights.
- 5am–8am48 flights69.8%
- 8am–11am13 flights—
- 11am–2pm51 flights62.0%
- 2pm–5pm13 flights—
- 5pm–8pm25 flights—
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 55% to 75%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 62.0% on time against 69.8% for 5am–8am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 51 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Frontier on ORD to BWI through the year
- Jul–Sep 202543 flights65.1%
- Oct–Dec 202545 flights52.4%
- Jan–Mar 202640 flights73.7%
- Apr–Jun 202622 flights—
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 65.3% on time across 150 flights.
Frontier on ORD to BWI did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Jan–Mar 2026 at 73.7% on time and its weakest Oct–Dec 2025 at 52.4%, a swing of 21 points on roughly 50 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 65.0% on time and Sunday the weakest at 58.3%. 7 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 4,002 reported delay minutes.
- 42%Late-arriving aircraft
- 32%Carrier
- 26%National Airspace System
- 1%Extreme weather
42% 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 4,002 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 42 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 4,002 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 69.8% on time here.
Cancellations run at 4.00%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in 25 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. 13.2% 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.
The 622 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 runs 64.3% on time across 150 flights, within about a point of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 150 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 ORD to BWI
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.00% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you a little over an hour; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 5am–8am departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 144 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to BWI, every carrier
- Frontier on BWI to ORD, the return leg
- Envoy Air on ORD to BWI76.4%
- United Airlines on ORD to BWI71.1%
- Republic Airways on ORD to BWI70.5%
- Southwest Airlines on ORD to BWI63.1%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall (BWI) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- 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.