Carrier route record

WNHNL→ITO

Southwest Airlines · Honolulu to Hilo

Flights: 1,857
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 29%
Carriers: 3

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

Southwest on HNL to ITO earns an A+. Close to nine flights in ten arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 12 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about 45 minutes. That rests on 1,857 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Hawaiian Airlines, flew 2,215 at 87.4% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Southwest's HNL to ITO record is 12 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 120 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

89.6%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,843 completed flights

Avg delay

45 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.75%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

85.2%

Every carrier on HNL to ITO, 6,341 flights

These figures cover 1,857 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 6 minutes early, which is the part an average hides: most flights here are fine, and the on-time rate is decided by a tail of badly late ones. On-time means under 15 minutes late, the DOT's own threshold.

Carrier by carrier

Southwest against every carrier on HNL to ITO

Southwest flew 1,857 of the 6,341 flights on HNL to ITO, about 29% of it. Its 89.6% on time is 4 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 85.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 89.6% to Alaska at 79.5%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Hawaiian Airlines arrives on time 87.4% of the time; Alaska Airlines manages 79.5%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 2,269 flights means less than a ten-point one.

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

Hawaiian leads Alaska by 8 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.

Departure window

When Southwest runs best on this route

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 25 points, against 8 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am366 flights97.5%
8am–11am367 flights94.8%
11am–2pm360 flights84.1%
2pm–5pm38 flights73.0%
5pm–8pm364 flights85.6%
8pm–5am362 flights87.4%

Scale runs 65% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 97.5% of the time, against 73.0% for the afternoon window. That is 25 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 367 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Southwest on HNL to ITO through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.October best, February worst

February is the weak month at 77.9% on time, against 96.1% in October. Winter delays cluster: a single storm system can account for most of a month's shortfall, so an average December hides both very good weeks and genuinely unflyable days. July was the busiest month here, with 181 flights.

Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 95.1% on time and Friday the weakest at 83.4%. 12 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Southwest runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 49% of the 8,548 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.

Late-arriving aircraft
49%
Carrier
44%
National Airspace System
6%
Security
1%

49% 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 8,548 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 49 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 8,548 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 44%, 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 3,751 of the 8,548 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.75%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Roughly one flight in 100 is called off; the risk here is arriving late, not not arriving.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 1.8% 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 93.9% on time across 1,857 flights, 4 points above 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 4 points of difference.

The sample behind these figures is 1,857 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 Southwest on HNL to ITO

Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. October runs 96.1% on time and February 77.9%, a swing of 18 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of February before you think about anything else. 1,843 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