Frontier Airlines, the low-cost carrier known for pictures of wolves, squirrels, big-horn sheep and other animals on its planes’ tails and wings, will add four new flights from Charlotte in the coming months, the company announced recently.
But will its flights take off on time?
One-third of all Frontier flights from Charlotte Douglas International Airport were delayed at least 15 minutes last year, according to a Charlotte Observer analysis of U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics data.
About 13% of Frontier’s flights from Charlotte were an hour or more late and 3% were canceled.
Among U.S. carriers, only Spirit Air Lines had a higher percentage of delayed domestic flights leaving the Queen City, BTS data show.
Most of the flights from Charlotte Douglas are American Airlines, which had a quarter of its domestic flights leave late last year, The Observer found.
“We were disappointed in our operational performance last year and have been gradually implementing a network redesign to shift heavily towards more out and back aircraft routings versus multi-day trips,” said Frontier spokesperson Jennifer de la Cruz, in an email to The Observer.
Delays because of weather or air traffic control problems have less of an effect on flights that travel back and forth between two cities rather than to a third airport, de la Cruz said.
But bad weather accounted for about 20 of Frontier’s more than 700 delays last year, The Observer found. Issues with the National Air System accounted for about 120 late flights. Problems with Frontier itself caused about 200 delays, data show.
Charlotte Douglas ranks 10th for delays
About 195,000 domestic flights took off from Charlotte Douglas last year. They crisscrossed the country, landing in Bangor, Maine; Key West, Florida; Seattle, Washington, and dozens of cities in between.
About one in five flights from Charlotte last year were delayed, data show. That ranked 10th among the nation’s major airports, according to BTS. The Minneapolis/St. Paul airport had the best on-time departure performance with less than 17% of its flights leaving late in 2023.
Frontier was responsible for some 2,200 flights and about 730 delayed flights leaving Charlotte, The Observer’s analysis found.
Both numbers will likely increase in 2024, as the Denver-based company adds daily and weekly service to New York, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Baltimore, Buffalo, N.Y, Miami, Cincinnati, Ohio and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Frontier stopped flights from Charlotte to Las Vegas this year.
The worst day for delays
Some other takeaways from the federal delay data include:
▪ Sundays saw the highest percentage of delays leaving Charlotte, with 24% of departures leaving at least 15 minutes late.
▪ The longest delay was more than 28 hours for an American Airlines flight to San Francisco last July.
▪ Just three of Frontiers’ flights were diverted to another airport last year. Two were traveling to Las Vegas and one to Orlando.
▪ Like Frontier, Allegiant Air, which flies from Concord to several cities in Florida, left late about one-third of the time.
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