Carrier route record

F9PIT→PHL

Frontier Airlines · Pittsburgh to Philadelphia

Flights: 104
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 8%
Carriers: 4

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

Frontier on PIT to PHL draws a D. Roughly one flight in three 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 104 flights, with a median arrival 3 minutes late.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Frontier on PIT to PHL runs 16 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 158 extra late arrivals.

On time

61.8%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 102 completed flights

Avg delay

123 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.92%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

77.2%

Every carrier on PIT to PHL, 1,226 flights

These figures cover 104 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 25.5% 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 PIT to PHL

Frontier flew 104 of the 1,226 flights on PIT to PHL, about 8% of it. Its 61.8% on time is 15 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 77.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Republic at 89.7% to Frontier at 61.8%. Two 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 PIT to PHL
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Republic Airwaysthin sample	305	89.7%	46 min	1.64%	A
American Airlines	625	75.1%	93 min	2.24%	B
PSA Airlinesthin sample	192	72.5%	94 min	5.21%	C−
Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample	104	61.8%	123 min	1.92%	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 104 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Frontier's PIT to PHL record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 61.8% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Frontier on PIT to PHL through the year

Jul–Sep 202551 flights58.0%
Oct–Dec 202550 flights65.3%
Jan–Mar 20263 flights—

Scale runs 50% 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 61.8% on time across 104 flights.

Split by quarter, Frontier on PIT to PHL logged 51 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 50 flights in Oct–Dec 2025 and 3 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 61.8% annual figure is the one to use.

Delay causes

Why Frontier runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 53% of the 4,784 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
53%
National Airspace System
40%
Carrier
7%

53% 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 4,784 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 53 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 4,784 reported delay minutes.

40% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 1,910 minutes out of 4,784, against a national NAS share of 21%.

Cancellations sit at 1.92% 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. 25.5% 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 268 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 2pm–5pm window matters as much as it does.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 70.6% on time across 104 flights, 9 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 9 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 104 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 PIT to PHL

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 104 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 61.8% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 102 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