Carrier route record

ASHNL→ITO

Alaska Airlines · Honolulu to Hilo

Flights: 2,269
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 36%
Carriers: 3

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

Alaska on HNL to ITO lands a B, 2 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by roughly 40 minutes on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 2,269 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Southwest Airlines, flew 1,857 at 89.6% on time.

The US average over the same twelve months is 77.6%, so there is little to separate Alaska on HNL to ITO from the country as a whole. The variation that matters here is internal: which carrier, and what time of day.

On time

79.5%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,221 completed flights

Avg delay

39 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

2.03%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

85.2%

Every carrier on HNL to ITO, 6,341 flights

These figures cover 2,269 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. On-time means an arrival less than 15 minutes after the scheduled gate time, the same threshold the Department of Transportation uses in its own reports. Cancelled and diverted flights are excluded from the on-time rate and counted separately, which is why the cancellation column matters on its own.

Carrier by carrier

Alaska against every carrier on HNL to ITO

Alaska flew 2,269 of the 6,341 flights on HNL to ITO, about 36% of it. Its 79.5% on time is 6 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 85.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 89.6% to Alaska at 79.5%.

The two carriers here are closely matched: 2 points separate the best from the worst. At that spread, schedule and price are better tie-breakers than reliability. Sample sizes are shown so you can see which rows are worth weighing.

On-time performance by carrier on HNL to ITO
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Southwest Airlines	1,857	89.6%	45 min	0.75%	A+
Hawaiian Airlines	2,215	87.4%	35 min	0.45%	A+
Alaska Airlines (this page)	2,269	79.5%	39 min	2.03%	B

No carrier stands out. Southwest tops the table at 89.6%, 2 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.

Departure window

When Alaska runs best on this route

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 23 points, against 2 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am430 flights90.9%
8am–11am405 flights87.4%
11am–2pm464 flights73.4%
2pm–5pm410 flights68.2%
5pm–8pm381 flights76.2%
8pm–5am179 flights82.2%

Scale runs 60% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 90.9% of the time, against 68.2% for the afternoon window. That is 23 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 464 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Alaska on HNL to ITO through the year

Jan–Mar 20261,116 flights78.9%
Apr–Jun 20261,153 flights80.0%

Scale runs 70% to 85%. 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 79.5% on time across 2,269 flights.

Split by quarter, Alaska on HNL to ITO logged 1,116 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 1,153 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 79.5% annual figure is the one to use.

Across the week, Sunday is the strongest day at 81.4% on time and Friday the weakest at 75.8%. 6 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Alaska runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 51% of the 18,000 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.

Carrier
51%
Late-arriving aircraft
38%
National Airspace System
6%
Extreme weather
5%
Security
0%

38% 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 18,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 8 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 17,693 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 51%, falls under carrier control: crew scheduling, maintenance, fuelling, baggage. Unlike weather, that is a management outcome, and it is the category where the gap between two carriers on the same schedule is genuinely earned. It accounts for 8,972 of the 18,000 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations sit at 2.03% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.09%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.3% 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.

At 216 miles this is a short hop, and stage length matters more than it looks. A flight this short spends under two hours in the air, which leaves almost nothing to claw back a late pushback with. Delay here is decided on the ground, in the turn, which is why the 5am–8am window matters as much as it does.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 74.5% on time across 2,266 flights, 5 points below this direction. Departure banks, aircraft rotations and the congestion at each end all differ, so scoring the two directions together would average away a real 5 points of difference.

The sample behind these figures is 2,269 flights, enough that the headline rate is stable to within roughly a point. The hour-block and month splits divide that further, so read the thinner bars with more caution than the headline.

What to do with this

Booking Alaska on HNL to ITO

Put together: take the 5am–8am departure, avoid the peak month if the dates are flexible, and if two carriers are within a few dollars of each other, Southwest is the one with the record behind it. None of that guarantees an on-time arrival; it moves the odds by 23 points, which is the most any booking decision can do. 2,221 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