We analyzed 2026 taxi times at US airports, and an alarming data point immediately stood out. Frontier Airlines has a taxi time problem across the top ten US airports. How big is the problem? These ten airports account for 21% of the airline’s flights. These top ten airports have an average taxi time of 36.1 minutes
. This problem can also be refined to show that this taxi time represents 21% of the total elapsed flight time.
US DOT data shows Frontier costs run at $143/minute. The industry average taxi time is 27.6 minutes, so those 8.5 minutes could cost the airline $1,215. Over the period tracked, there have been 14,461 Frontier flights. Potentially $17.6m in extra taxi time. Over four months, Frontier’s extra taxi time is worth about 20% of a heavily discounted A321neo’s list price (~$130m). (As they say, ‘prices may vary’)
The Charts
Deploying our new Airport Congestion KPIs, we discovered this item. To read this chart, start on the left where we selected the top ten origin airports. At these airports, Frontier has the highest taxi times, as shown in the top table to the right. The second table on the right shows that these flights impacted 21% of the airline’s operated flights. The third table on the right shows that for these flights, taxi time was 21% of total elapsed time. The table at the bottom right shows the airline’s flights from the selected airports for the period at 14,461.
We analyzed 2026 taxi times at US airports, and an alarming data point immediately stood out. Frontier Airlines has a taxi time problem across the top ten US airports. How big is the problem? These ten airports account for 21% of the airline’s flights. These top ten airports have an average taxi time of 36.1 minutes. This problem can also be refined to show that this taxi time represents 21% of the total elapsed flight time.
US DOT data shows Frontier costs run at $143/minute. The industry average taxi time is 27.6 minutes, so those 8.5 minutes could cost the airline $1,215. Over the period tracked, there have been 14,461 Frontier flights. Potentially $17.6m in extra taxi time. Over four months, Frontier’s extra taxi time is worth about 20% of a heavily discounted A321neo’s price. (As they say, ‘prices may vary’)
Want this applied to your fleet or portfolio?
We can run a focused 15–20 minute walkthrough on the implications for your specific programs or risk exposure — or put together a custom subscription proposal.
We use cookies to optimize our website and our service.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
