Carrier route record
F9SNA→DEN
Frontier Airlines · Santa Ana to Denver
- Flights
- 292
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 8%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Frontier Airlines.
Frontier on SNA to DEN earns a B+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 7 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs an hour and a half. That rests on 292 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, United Airlines, flew 1,870 at 86.1% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Frontier's SNA to DEN record is 7 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 73 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
84.9%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 291 completed flights
Avg delay
91 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.34%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
82.4%
Every carrier on SNA to DEN, 3,697 flights
These figures cover 292 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 9 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 SNA to DEN
Frontier flew 292 of the 3,697 flights on SNA to DEN, about 8% of it. Its 84.9% on time is 3 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 82.4%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from United at 86.1% to Southwest at 77.5%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. United Airlines arrives on time 86.1% of the time; Southwest Airlines manages 77.5%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,535 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Airlines | 1,870 | 86.1% | 64 min | 0.37% | A+ |
| Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample | 292 | 84.9% | 91 min | 0.34% | B+ |
| Southwest Airlines | 1,535 | 77.5% | 57 min | 0.46% | B+ |
United leads Southwest by 9 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.
Flight by flight
Frontier flight numbers on SNA to DEN
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 15 points, against 9 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am37 flights97.3%
- 11am–2pm237 flights82.2%
- 2pm–5pm18 flights—
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 75% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 82.2% on time against 97.3% for 8am–11am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 237 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Frontier on SNA to DEN through the year
- Jul–Sep 202586 flights77.9%
- Oct–Dec 202586 flights88.2%
- Jan–Mar 202660 flights81.7%
- Apr–Jun 202660 flights93.3%
Scale runs 70% to 100%. 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 84.9% on time across 292 flights.
Frontier on SNA to DEN did not run the same all year. Its best quarter was Apr–Jun 2026 at 93.3% on time and its weakest Jul–Sep 2025 at 77.9%, a swing of 15 points on roughly 73 flights a quarter. The twelve-month rate averages over that, so if you are flying in a weak quarter the quarter's own figure is the better guide.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 90.9% on time and Friday the weakest at 80.8%. 10 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why Frontier runs late on this route
Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 3,991 reported delay minutes.
- 41%Carrier
- 39%Late-arriving aircraft
- 19%National Airspace System
39% 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 3,991 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 39 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 3,991 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 41%, 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 1,654 of the 3,991 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.34%, below the national 1.81% 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
6.9% of arrivals land an hour or more late, close to the national 8.1%. That is the figure that decides a connection, and it says a 60 to 75 minute layover is reasonable here while anything under 45 minutes is a bet. Most delays on this route last an hour and a half, which a normal layover absorbs.
The 846 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 runs 86.9% on time across 292 flights, within 2 points of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 292 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 SNA to DEN
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 292 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 84.9% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 291 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- SNA to DEN, every carrier
- Frontier on DEN to SNA, the return leg
- United Airlines on SNA to DEN86.1%
- Southwest Airlines on SNA to DEN77.5%
- Frontier Airlines network-wide record
- John Wayne Airport (SNA) delay statistics
- Denver International (DEN) 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.