Carrier route record

F9SNA→SLC

Frontier Airlines · Santa Ana to Salt Lake City

Flights: 101
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 5%
Carriers: 4

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

Frontier on SNA to SLC earns an A+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 8 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 101 flights, with a median arrival 12 minutes early.

Set against the rest of the country, Frontier's SNA to SLC record is 8 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 84 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

86.0%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 100 completed flights

Avg delay

58 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.99%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

86.9%

Every carrier on SNA to SLC, 1,855 flights

These figures cover 101 flights between July 2025 and June 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.

Carrier by carrier

Frontier against every carrier on SNA to SLC

Frontier flew 101 of the 1,855 flights on SNA to SLC, about 5% of it. Its 86.0% on time is about level with the route as a whole at 86.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number three of four carriers on the route, where the range runs from SkyWest at 88.7% to Allegiant at 0.0%. 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 SNA to SLC
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
SkyWest Airlinesthin sample	98	88.7%	139 min	1.02%	A
Delta Air Lines	1,655	86.9%	96 min	0.60%	A+
Frontier Airlines (this page)thin sample	101	86.0%	58 min	0.99%	A+
Allegiant Airthin sample	1	0.0%	150 min	0.00%	F+

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 101 flights.

There are not enough flights in each departure window to split Frontier's SNA to SLC record by time of day without the percentages moving on noise. The headline rate of 86.0% is the reliable figure here.

Across the year

Frontier on SNA to SLC through the year

Oct–Dec 202527 flights—
Jan–Mar 202657 flights91.2%
Apr–Jun 202617 flights—

Scale runs 85% to 95%. 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 86.0% on time across 101 flights.

Split by quarter, Frontier on SNA to SLC logged 27 flights in Oct–Dec 2025, 57 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 17 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 86.0% 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 62% of the 816 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
62%
Carrier
29%
National Airspace System
7%
Extreme weather
2%

62% 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 816 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 27 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 816 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 88.0% on time here.

Cancellations sit at 0.99% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.0% land an hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% 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 588 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 86.5% on time across 101 flights, within half a point 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. 101 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 SLC

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 101 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 86.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 100 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