Carrier route record
F9RDU→ORD
Frontier Airlines · Raleigh to Chicago
- Flights
- 131
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 4%
- Carriers
- 7
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on RDU to ORD earns a D−, which is as low as this site's scale goes for a reason. Only 57.7% of flights arrive inside the 15-minute window, 20 points worse than the national rate of 77.6%. Late arrivals average about 2.3 hours. Treat any tight connection here as a coin flip. That rests on 131 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, American Airlines, flew 553 at 82.2% on time.
American Airlines is the most reliable of the four carriers covered here at 82.2% on time across 553 flights.
Key figures
On time
57.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 123 completed flights
Avg delay
139 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
5.34%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
74.4%
Every carrier on RDU to ORD, 3,589 flights
These figures cover 131 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 23.6% 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 RDU to ORD
Frontier flew 131 of the 3,589 flights on RDU to ORD, about 4% of it. Its 57.7% on time is 17 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 74.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number six of seven carriers on the route, where the range runs from American at 82.2% to PSA at 50.0%. Two of those carriers flew fewer than 365 flights here, so treat their positions as rough.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. American Airlines arrives on time 82.2% of the time; Republic Airways manages 70.7%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,018 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| American Airlines | 553 | 82.2% | 145 min | 3.44% | B− |
| SkyWest Airlinesthin sample | 67 | 77.3% | 138 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| United Airlines | 1,295 | 76.3% | 87 min | 1.16% | B |
| Envoy Air | 523 | 72.3% | 86 min | 1.72% | C |
| Republic Airways | 1,018 | 70.7% | 75 min | 3.63% | C− |
| Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample | 131 | 57.7% | 139 min | 5.34% | D− |
| PSA Airlinesthin sample | 2 | 50.0% | 31 min | 0.00% | F+ |
Republic Airways cancels 3.6% 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 131 flights.
There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Frontier's RDU to ORD record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 57.7% is the reliable figure here.
Across the year
Frontier on RDU to ORD through the year
- Jul–Sep 202546 flights67.4%
- Oct–Dec 202548 flights50.0%
- Jan–Mar 202617 flights—
- Apr–Jun 202620 flights—
Scale runs 40% to 75%. 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 57.7% on time across 131 flights.
Split by quarter, Frontier on RDU to ORD logged 46 flights in Jul–Sep 2025, 48 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 17 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 20 flights in Apr–Jun 2026. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 57.7% annual figure is the one to use.
Across the week, Sunday is the strongest day at 58.8% on time and Thursday the weakest at 54.8%. 4 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. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 49% of the 7,212 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.
- 49%Late-arriving aircraft
- 39%National Airspace System
- 12%Carrier
- 1%Extreme weather
49% 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 7,212 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 49 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 7,212 reported delay minutes.
39% 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 2,817 minutes out of 7,212, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations run at 5.34%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in twenty 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. 23.6% 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 646 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 is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 66.4% on time across 131 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. 131 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 ORD
Put together: the delay figures matter less here than the 5.34% cancellation rate. A late arrival costs you about 2.3 hours; a cancelled flight costs you the day. Book the 2pm–5pm departure so there is still a schedule behind you if it goes wrong, and treat a same-day connection as optimistic. 123 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- RDU to ORD, every carrier
- Frontier on ORD to RDU, the return leg
- American Airlines on RDU to ORD82.2%
- United Airlines on RDU to ORD76.3%
- Envoy Air on RDU to ORD72.3%
- Republic Airways on RDU to ORD70.7%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Raleigh-Durham International (RDU) delay statistics
- Chicago O'Hare International (ORD) 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, July 2025 to June 2026. Last updated 15 September 2026; recomputed monthly. How this data is collected.