Carrier route record

ASHNL→KOA

Alaska Airlines · Honolulu to Kailua-Kona

Flights: 2,781
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 38%
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 KOA lands a B, 4 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six 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 2,781 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Southwest Airlines, flew 1,770 at 90.3% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Alaska's HNL to KOA record is 4 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 43 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

81.9%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,734 completed flights

Avg delay

39 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

1.65%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

86.1%

Every carrier on HNL to KOA, 7,278 flights

These figures cover 2,781 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 KOA

Alaska flew 2,781 of the 7,278 flights on HNL to KOA, about 38% of it. Its 81.9% on time is 4 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 86.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 90.3% to Alaska at 81.9%.

The two carriers here are closely matched: 3 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 KOA
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Southwest Airlines	1,770	90.3%	44 min	0.90%	A+
Hawaiian Airlines	2,727	87.6%	37 min	0.73%	A+
Alaska Airlines (this page)	2,781	81.9%	39 min	1.65%	B

No carrier stands out. Southwest tops the table at 90.3%, 3 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 22 points, against 3 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am437 flights94.7%
8am–11am620 flights90.3%
11am–2pm572 flights73.5%
2pm–5pm503 flights72.6%
5pm–8pm472 flights77.9%
8pm–5am177 flights83.4%

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 94.7% of the time, against 72.6% for the afternoon window. That is 22 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 620 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Alaska on HNL to KOA through the year

Jan–Mar 20261,413 flights79.8%
Apr–Jun 20261,368 flights83.9%

Scale runs 70% to 90%. 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 81.9% on time across 2,781 flights.

Split by quarter, Alaska on HNL to KOA logged 1,413 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 1,368 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 81.9% annual figure is the one to use.

Across the week, Sunday is the strongest day at 87.2% on time and Friday the weakest at 74.9%. 12 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 50% of the 19,000 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
50%
Late-arriving aircraft
38%
National Airspace System
7%
Extreme weather
6%
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 19,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 7 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 19,187 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 50%, 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 9,524 of the 19,000 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations sit at 1.65% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.04%.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 2.9% 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 163 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 77.4% on time across 2,783 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 2,781 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 KOA

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 22 points, which is the most any booking decision can do. 2,734 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