Carrier route record
F9RDU→DTW
Frontier Airlines · Raleigh to Detroit
- Flights
- 114
- Period
- September 2025 to August 2026
- Share of route
- 8%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for September 2025 to August 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on RDU to DTW 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 77.3%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs roughly 50 minutes. That rests on 114 flights, with a median arrival 12 minutes early.
Set against the rest of the country, Frontier's RDU to DTW record is 10 points better than the US average of 77.3%. That gap is worth roughly 103 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
87.6%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 113 completed flights
Avg delay
52 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.88%
National rate is 1.89%
Whole route
88.6%
Every carrier on RDU to DTW, 1,480 flights
These figures cover 114 flights between September 2025 and August 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.
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Carrier by carrier
Frontier against every carrier on RDU to DTW
Frontier flew 114 of the 1,480 flights on RDU to DTW, about 8% of it. Its 87.6% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 88.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Spirit at 90.9% to Frontier at 87.6%. One 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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spirit Airlinesthin sample | 33 | 90.9% | 80 min | 0.00% | A+ |
| Delta Air Lines | 1,333 | 88.6% | 85 min | 1.58% | A |
| Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample | 114 | 87.6% | 52 min | 0.88% | A+ |
Timetable by Aviasales, a Travelpayouts partner. Booking through it may earn this site a commission at no cost to you; it changes no figure here.
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 114 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Frontier's RDU to DTW record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 87.6% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
Frontier on RDU to DTW through the year
- Jul–Sep 202517 flights—
- Oct–Dec 202544 flights84.1%
- Jan–Mar 202619 flights—
- Apr–Jun 202620 flights—
- Jul–Sep 202614 flights—
Scale runs 75% to 90%. 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 87.6% on time across 114 flights.
Split by quarter, Frontier on RDU to DTW logged 17 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 44 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 19 flights in Jan–Mar 2026, 20 flights in Apr–Jun 2026 and 14 flights in Jul–Sep 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 87.6% annual figure is the one to use.
Arrival by arrival
How late Frontier on RDU to DTW runs when it is late
Frontier on RDU to DTW often beats the schedule: 44 of 113 completed flights, 39%, arrived 15 minutes or more early. The 14 late arrivals split 6 under half an hour, 4 between 30 and 60 minutes, and 4 an hour or more.
- 15+ min early44 flights38.9%
- Within 15 min55 flights48.7%
- 15–29 min late6 flights5.3%
- 30–59 min late4 flights3.5%
- 1–2 hours late3 flights2.7%
- 2+ hours late1 flights0.9%
Scale runs 0% to 100%.
Share of 113 completed flights by arrival against schedule.
Only 13 of 113 completed flights left 15 minutes late or more, too few to say how often the time is made up.
The worst days
Worst days for Frontier on RDU to DTW
The latest arrival of the period was on 14 December 2025, 2 hours 44 minutes behind schedule; most of its delay minutes were filed as a late-arriving aircraft. The same cause led on five of the five worst days.
| Date | Arrived late by | Largest filed cause |
|---|---|---|
| 14 December 2025 | 2 hours 44 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 15 January 2026 | 1 hour 36 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 1 September 2025 | 1 hour 32 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 24 November 2025 | 1 hour 20 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
| 29 March 2026 | 46 minutes | Late-arriving aircraft |
Delay causes
Why Frontier runs late on this route
Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 85% of the 723 delay minutes carriers reported here, and the remaining four split what is left.
- 85%Late-arriving aircraft
- 8%National Airspace System
- 6%Carrier
85% of delay minutes trace back to a late-arriving aircraft, meaning the plane was already behind before it got here. Across 723 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 85 to one. The split is drawn from 723 reported delay minutes.
The practical consequence: the 8am–11am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 90.3% on time here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.88%, below the national 1.89% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Roughly one flight in 100 is called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.5% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.3% 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.
The 501 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 80.0% on time across 114 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. 114 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 RDU to DTW
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 114 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 87.6% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 113 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- RDU to DTW, every carrier
- Frontier on DTW to RDU, the return leg
- Delta Air Lines on RDU to DTW88.6%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Raleigh-Durham International (RDU) delay statistics
- Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County (DTW) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- How to read this site: grades, sample sizes, and honest caveats
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.