Carrier route record

HAHNL→KOA

Hawaiian Airlines · Honolulu to Kailua-Kona

Flights: 2,727
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 37%
Carriers: 3

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

Hawaiian on HNL to KOA 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 10 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs roughly 35 minutes. That rests on 2,727 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, Hawaiian's HNL to KOA record is 10 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 100 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

87.6%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,704 completed flights

Avg delay

37 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.73%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

86.1%

Every carrier on HNL to KOA, 7,278 flights

These figures cover 2,727 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

Hawaiian against every carrier on HNL to KOA

Hawaiian flew 2,727 of the 7,278 flights on HNL to KOA, about 37% of it. Its 87.6% on time is 2 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 86.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is number two of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 90.3% to Alaska at 81.9%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Southwest Airlines arrives on time 90.3% of the time; Alaska Airlines manages 81.9%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 2,781 flights means less than a ten-point one.

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 (this page)	2,727	87.6%	37 min	0.73%	A+
Alaska Airlines	2,781	81.9%	39 min	1.65%	B

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

Departure window

When Hawaiian runs best on this route

Departure time matters more here than the choice of carrier. The gap between the best and worst window is 18 points, against 8 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am485 flights94.0%
8am–11am599 flights93.4%
11am–2pm488 flights84.5%
2pm–5pm372 flights76.5%
5pm–8pm604 flights86.3%
8pm–5am179 flights87.1%

Scale runs 70% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 94.0% of the time, against 76.5% for the afternoon window. That is 18 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 604 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Hawaiian on HNL to KOA through the year

Jul–Sep 20251,391 flights90.9%
Oct–Dec 20251,336 flights84.2%

Scale runs 75% to 95%. 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 87.6% on time across 2,727 flights.

Split by quarter, Hawaiian on HNL to KOA logged 1,391 flights in Jul–Sep 2025 and 1,336 flights in Oct–Dec 2025. Fewer than three of those quarters carried the 30 completed flights this site needs before printing a rate, so the 87.6% annual figure is the one to use.

Across the week, Sunday is the strongest day at 92.5% on time and Thursday the weakest at 84.4%. 8 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Hawaiian runs late on this route

One category carries most of the weight here. Carrier accounts for 61% of the 12,000 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
61%
Late-arriving aircraft
35%
Extreme weather
1%
National Airspace System
1%
Security
1%

35% 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 12,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 24 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 12,281 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 61%, 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 7,545 of the 12,000 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.73%, 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 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 runs 86.4% on time across 2,727 flights, within about a point of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.

The sample behind these figures is 2,727 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 Hawaiian 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 18 points, which is the most any booking decision can do. 2,704 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