Frontier Airlines, the low-cost carrier known for depicting wolves, squirrels, bighorn sheep and other animals on the tails and wings of its planes, will offer four new flights from Charlotte in the coming months, the company recently announced.
But will the flights take off on time?
A third of all Frontier flights from Charlotte Douglas International Airport were delayed by at least 15 minutes last year, according to a Charlotte Observer analysis of U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics data.
About 13% of Frontier flights from Charlotte were delayed an hour or more and 3% were canceled.
Among U.S. airlines, only Spirit Air Lines had a higher percentage of delayed domestic flights out of the Queen City, according to BTS data.
Most flights from Charlotte Douglas are operated by American Airlines, which canceled a quarter of its domestic flights late last year, according to The Observer.
“We were disappointed with our operational performance last year and have been gradually implementing a redesign of our network to shift the emphasis from multi-day flights to round-trip flights,” Frontier spokeswoman Jennifer de la Cruz said in an email to The Observer.
Weather-related delays or air traffic control problems would have less impact on flights flying between two cities than on flights to a third airport, de la Cruz said.
But according to The Observer, about 20 of Frontier’s more than 700 delays last year were due to bad weather. Problems with the National Air System were responsible for about 120 delayed flights. Problems with Frontier itself caused about 200 delays, the data shows.
Charlotte Douglas ranks 10th in delays
Last year, approximately 195,000 domestic flights departed from Charlotte Douglas, crisscrossing the country and landing in Bangor, Maine; Key West, Florida; Seattle, Washington; and dozens of cities in between.
About one in five flights from Charlotte were delayed last year, data shows. That ranked 10th among the country’s major airports, according to BTS. Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport had the best on-time performance, with fewer than 17% of its flights departing late in 2023.
According to the Observer’s analysis, Frontier was responsible for about 2,200 flights and about 730 delayed flights out of Charlotte.
Both numbers are likely to increase in 2024 as the Denver-based company adds daily and weekly service to New York, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Baltimore, Buffalo, NY, Miami, Cincinnati, Ohio and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Frontier stopped flying from Charlotte to Las Vegas this year.
The worst day for delays
Other findings from federal delay data include:
▪ Sundays saw the most delays on departures to Charlotte: 24% of departures were at least 15 minutes late.
▪ The longest delay was more than 28 hours for an American Airlines flight to San Francisco last July.
▪ Only three Frontiers flights were diverted to another airport last year. Two were to Las Vegas and one to Orlando.
▪ Like Frontier, Allegiant Air, which flies from Concord to several Florida cities, was delayed about a third of the time.
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