Carrier route record
WNHNL→KOA
Southwest Airlines · Honolulu to Kailua-Kona
- Flights
- 1,770
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 24%
- 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 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 13 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs roughly 45 minutes. That rests on 1,770 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Hawaiian Airlines, flew 2,727 at 87.6% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Southwest's HNL to KOA record is 13 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 127 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
90.3%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,754 completed flights
Avg delay
44 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.90%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
86.1%
Every carrier on HNL to KOA, 7,278 flights
These figures cover 1,770 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 7 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 KOA
Southwest flew 1,770 of the 7,278 flights on HNL to KOA, about 24% of it. Its 90.3% on time is 4 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 86.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first 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: 6 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.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlines (this page) | 1,770 | 90.3% | 44 min | 0.90% | A+ |
| Hawaiian Airlines | 2,727 | 87.6% | 37 min | 0.73% | A+ |
| Alaska Airlines | 2,781 | 81.9% | 39 min | 1.65% | B |
No carrier stands out. Hawaiian tops the table at 87.6%, 6 points clear of the bottom, which is inside the range this kind of sample moves year to year.
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 14 points, against 6 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am314 flights95.5%
- 8am–11am364 flights95.5%
- 11am–2pm265 flights81.1%
- 2pm–5pm101 flights82.2%
- 5pm–8pm364 flights88.6%
- 8pm–5am362 flights91.4%
Scale runs 75% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 81.1% on time against 95.5% for 5am–8am. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 364 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on HNL to KOA through the year
October is the best month on the calendar at 97.3% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. January was the busiest month here, with 151 flights.
Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 94.6% on time and Friday the weakest at 85.2%. 9 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 7,199 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.
- 49%Late-arriving aircraft
- 39%Carrier
- 11%National Airspace System
- 1%Extreme weather
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 7,199 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 7,199 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 39%, 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 2,841 of the 7,199 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations sit at 0.90% against a national 1.81%, which is ordinary. Diversions add another 0.00%.
Connections and stage length
What a delay here costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 1.9% 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 95.3% on time across 1,770 flights, 5 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 5 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,770 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 KOA
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. October runs 97.3% on time and March 80.1%, a swing of 17 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of March before you think about anything else. 1,754 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- HNL to KOA, every carrier
- Southwest on KOA to HNL, the return leg
- Hawaiian Airlines on HNL to KOA87.6%
- Alaska Airlines on HNL to KOA81.9%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Daniel K. Inouye International (HNL) delay statistics
- Hawaii inter-island flights: how reliable is island hopping?
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
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.