Carrier route record

F9PHX→SNA

Frontier Airlines · Phoenix to Santa Ana

Flights: 288
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 6%
Carriers: 3

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

Frontier on PHX to SNA earns an A. Close to nine flights in ten arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 10 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 288 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Southwest Airlines, flew 2,427 at 79.3% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Frontier's PHX to SNA record is 10 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 97 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

87.3%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 284 completed flights

Avg delay

68 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.04%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

79.6%

Every carrier on PHX to SNA, 4,609 flights

These figures cover 288 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 PHX to SNA

Frontier flew 288 of the 4,609 flights on PHX to SNA, about 6% of it. Its 87.3% on time is 8 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 79.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Frontier at 87.3% to American at 78.9%.

The two carriers here are closely matched: half a point 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.

On-time performance by carrier on PHX to SNA
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample	288	87.3%	68 min	1.04%	A
Southwest Airlines	2,427	79.3%	45 min	0.41%	B+
American Airlines	1,894	78.9%	66 min	0.37%	B+

No carrier stands out. Southwest tops the table at 79.3%, half a point 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 18 points, against half a point between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am33 flights84.8%
8am–11am45 flights95.5%
11am–2pm88 flights86.2%
2pm–5pm67 flights92.4%
5pm–8pm55 flights77.8%
8pm–5am—

Scale runs 70% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 95.5% of the time, against 77.8% for the evening window. That is 18 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 88 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Frontier on PHX to SNA through the year

Jul–Sep 202568 flights86.8%
Oct–Dec 202569 flights84.8%
Jan–Mar 202696 flights89.5%
Apr–Jun 202655 flights87.3%

Scale runs 75% to 95%. 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 87.3% on time across 288 flights.

Quarter by quarter Frontier on PHX to SNA held fairly steady: 86.8% in Jul–Sep 2025, 84.8% in Oct–Dec 2025, 89.5% in Jan–Mar 2026 and 87.3% in Apr–Jun 2026. A spread of 5 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 96.7% on time and Sunday the weakest at 77.2%. 20 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. Carrier accounts for 63% of the 2,450 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.

Carrier
63%
Late-arriving aircraft
27%
National Airspace System
10%

The largest share of delay minutes, 63%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 1,532 of the 2,450 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 2,450 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations sit at 1.04% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.35%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.9% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. Connections built on this flight are about as safe as US domestic connections get, though a cancelled flight still ignores every layover you give it.

At 338 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 8am–11am window matters as much as it does.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 83.2% on time across 288 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 288 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 PHX to SNA

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 288 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 87.3% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 284 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