Carrier route record
F9SJU→MCO
Frontier Airlines · San Juan to Orlando
- Flights
- 1,240
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 21%
- Carriers
- 4
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on SJU to MCO lands a B, about a point better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about 2.3 hours on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 1,240 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Southwest Airlines, flew 2,067 at 81.6% on time.
Southwest Airlines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 81.6% on time across 2,067 flights.
Key figures
On time
78.9%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,220 completed flights
Avg delay
138 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.37%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
78.9%
Every carrier on SJU to MCO, 6,048 flights
These figures cover 1,240 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.8% 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 SJU to MCO
Frontier flew 1,240 of the 6,048 flights on SJU to MCO, about 21% of it. Its 78.9% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 78.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 81.6% to JetBlue at 76.9%.
The three carriers here are closely matched: 5 points 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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlines | 2,067 | 81.6% | 47 min | 0.53% | B+ |
| Frontier Airlines (this page) | 1,240 | 78.9% | 138 min | 1.37% | B |
| Spirit Airlines | 611 | 77.1% | 78 min | 1.80% | B |
| JetBlue Airways | 2,130 | 76.9% | 72 min | 1.03% | B |
No carrier stands out. Southwest tops the table at 81.6%, 5 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
Flight by flight
Frontier flight numbers on SJU to MCO
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 27 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am146 flights85.3%
- 8am–11am187 flights88.1%
- 11am–2pm127 flights90.4%
- 2pm–5pm205 flights72.3%
- 5pm–8pm128 flights63.2%
- 8pm–5am447 flights77.0%
Scale runs 55% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 5pm–8pm window is where this operation falls apart: 63.2% on time, against 90.4% for the 11am–2pm slot. By evening the aircraft flying these rotations have absorbed a full day of small delays and there is no slack left to recover in. The 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 447 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Frontier on SJU to MCO through the year
August is the worst month at 57.1% on time, 32 points below May, the best at 89.3%. Summer afternoon convection and peak-season schedules land on the same weeks every year, so this is a pattern you can book around rather than a run of bad luck. June was the busiest month here, with 132 flights.
Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 82.2% on time and Sunday the weakest at 73.8%. 8 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 77% of the 36,000 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.
- 77%Late-arriving aircraft
- 20%Carrier
- 3%National Airspace System
77% 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 36,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 77 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 35,510 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations sit at 1.37% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.24%.
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. 9.8% 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 1,188 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 73.6% on time across 1,242 flights, 5 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 5 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,240 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.
What to do with this
Booking Frontier on SJU to MCO
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. May runs 89.3% on time and August 57.1%, a swing of 32 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of August before you think about anything else. 1,220 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- SJU to MCO, every carrier
- Frontier on MCO to SJU, the return leg
- Southwest Airlines on SJU to MCO81.6%
- Spirit Airlines on SJU to MCO77.1%
- JetBlue Airways on SJU to MCO76.9%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- Luis Munoz Marin International (SJU) delay statistics
- Orlando International (MCO) delay statistics
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
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.