Originally Posted by
JeffCO
My conclusions are: 1) that on comparable DEN->LGA late morning flights, Frontier reported nearly 4x more (31 vs. 8) delays related to weather (not carrier-specific or due to late-arriving planes) of 30 minutes or more than did United; and 2) that the average difference between delay times for the two airlines was 4x longer (49 vs. 12 min) for Frontier on its delay days than for United on its delay days.
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What remains unclear is the reason for the difference.
It would be interesting to know where the United aircraft that serves the late morning LGA-->DEN flight is coming from and how long it is scheduled to sit at the gate, versus Frontier. If the United aircraft has more "slack" time scheduled than the Frontier aircraft, that could be an explanation. I have never taken that Frontier flight but I've been on the ~5:30PM Frontier LGA-->DEN flight more than 50 times (used to commute for work) and I know it had a pretty short turn time in LGA.
In my anecdotal experience, while there were almost always delays if the weather was anything other than clear/sunny skies, Frontier always got me back to Denver eventually, even if delayed, and I appreciated the fact that they seemed less likely to cancel than United. This was several years back however and prior to the passenger-bill-of-rights stuff so I don't know if that's led to additional cancellations since.