Carrier route record
F9ORD→JFK
Frontier Airlines · Chicago to New York
- Flights
- 117
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 5%
- Carriers
- 5
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on ORD to JFK draws a D−. Roughly one flight in two arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is close to two hours behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 117 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, JetBlue Airways, flew 633 at 78.2% on time.
JetBlue Airways is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 78.2% on time across 633 flights.
Key figures
On time
59.8%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 112 completed flights
Avg delay
100 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
4.27%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
72.5%
Every carrier on ORD to JFK, 2,135 flights
These figures cover 117 flights between September 2025 and August 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 21.4% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally.
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Carrier by carrier
Frontier against every carrier on ORD to JFK
Frontier flew 117 of the 2,135 flights on ORD to JFK, about 5% of it. Its 59.8% on time is 13 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 72.5%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of five carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 92.3% to Frontier at 59.8%. One of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. JetBlue Airways arrives on time 78.2% of the time; American Airlines manages 60.5%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 541 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delta Air Linesthin sample | 14 | 92.3% | 221 min | 7.14% | A− |
| JetBlue Airways | 633 | 78.2% | 105 min | 7.90% | B− |
| Republic Airways | 830 | 77.5% | 75 min | 3.73% | B− |
| American Airlines | 541 | 60.5% | 98 min | 5.18% | D− |
| Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample | 117 | 59.8% | 100 min | 4.27% | D− |
JetBlue Airways cancels 7.9% 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.
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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 30 points, against 18 points between the best and worst carrier.
- 5am–8am55 flights69.8%
- 8am–11am14 flights—
- 11am–2pm48 flights40.0%
- 2pm–5pm—
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 30% 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 40.0% 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 5am–8am window is the busiest, with 55 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Frontier on ORD to JFK through the year
- Oct–Dec 202557 flights70.9%
- Jan–Mar 202660 flights49.1%
Scale runs 40% to 75%.
Monthly volumes are too low here to break the year into twelve reliable readings. What the twelve-month total says is 59.8% on time across 117 flights.
Split by quarter, Frontier on ORD to JFK logged 57 flights in Oct–Dec 2025 and 60 flights in Jan–Mar 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 59.8% annual figure is the one to use.
Arrival by arrival
How late Frontier on ORD to JFK runs when it is late
Frontier on ORD to JFK often beats the schedule: 39 of 112 completed flights, 35%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. When Frontier on ORD to JFK is late it tends to be very late: 24 of its 45 late arrivals were an hour or more behind, and 17 were two hours or more.
- 15+ min early39 flights34.8%
- Within 15 min28 flights25.0%
- 15–29 min late6 flights5.4%
- 30–59 min late15 flights13.4%
- 1–2 hours late7 flights6.3%
- 2+ hours late17 flights15.2%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 112 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
Time lost at the gate mostly stays lost. Of 39 departures that left 15 minutes late or more, only 3 made it up before arrival. In the other direction, 9 flights left on time yet arrived 15 minutes late or more, so that delay built up after pushback: in the air, in a holding pattern or on the ground at JFK.
The worst days
Worst days for Frontier on ORD to JFK
The latest arrival of the period was on 26 January 2026, 8 hours 7 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. The same cause led on three of the five worst days.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 26 January 2026 | 8 hours 7 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 24 December 2025 | 4 hours 8 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 3 January 2026 | 3 hours 57 minutes | Carrier |
| 24 November 2025 | 3 hours 46 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 22 February 2026 | 3 hours 44 minutes | Carrier |
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 4,498 reported delay minutes.
- 42%Carrier
- 39%Late-arriving aircraft
- 16%National Airspace System
- 4%Extreme weather
39% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 4,498 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 10 to one. The split is drawn from 4,498 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 42%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. It accounts for 1,869 of the 4,498 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations run at 4.27%, against 1.89% 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
21.4% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% nationally. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum for a connection here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.
The 740 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.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 51.4% on time across 116 flights, 8 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 8 points of difference.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 117 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 JFK
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 4.27% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you close to two hours; 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. 112 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- ORD to JFK, every carrier
- Frontier on JFK to ORD, the return leg
- JetBlue Airways on ORD to JFK78.2%
- Republic Airways on ORD to JFK77.5%
- American Airlines on ORD to JFK60.5%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) delay statistics
- John F. Kennedy International (JFK) delay statistics
- The US routes with the most cancellations
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
Source: US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance data, September 2025 to August 2026. Last updated ; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.