Carrier route record

WNHNL→LAS

Southwest Airlines · Honolulu to Las Vegas

Flights: 902
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 41%
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 LAS 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 15 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs roughly 35 minutes. That rests on 902 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Alaska Airlines, flew 635 at 73.7% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Southwest's HNL to LAS record is 15 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 150 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

92.6%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 896 completed flights

Avg delay

36 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.44%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

80.9%

Every carrier on HNL to LAS, 2,203 flights

These figures cover 902 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 12 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 LAS

Southwest flew 902 of the 2,203 flights on HNL to LAS, about 41% of it. Its 92.6% on time is 12 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 80.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 92.6% to Hawaiian at 72.0%.

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 LAS
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Southwest Airlines (this page)	902	92.6%	36 min	0.44%	A+
Alaska Airlines	635	73.7%	52 min	0.47%	C+
Hawaiian Airlines	666	72.0%	63 min	0.15%	C+

No carrier stands out. Alaska tops the table at 73.7%, 2 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 is the single lever a traveller controls, and it moves the odds more than most people expect. Each bar below is the on-time rate for flights scheduled to leave inside that window, across 902 flights.

5am–8am1 flights—
8am–11am364 flights90.6%
11am–2pm172 flights90.1%
2pm–5pm—
5pm–8pm1 flights—
8pm–5am364 flights95.8%

Scale runs 80% 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 90.1% on time against 95.8% for 8pm–5am. 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 LAS through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.August best, March worst

Delays peak in March, when the on-time rate falls to 78.7%. August is the strongest month at 100.0%. Moving a flexible trip across that boundary buys 21 points. May was the busiest month here, with 93 flights.

Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 95.4% on time and Friday the weakest at 89.8%. 6 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.

Delay causes

Why Southwest runs late on this route

Carriers report a reason for every delay minute they cause, in five DOT categories. The split below is by minutes, not by number of flights, so a handful of very long weather delays weighs as much as many short ones. It covers 2,382 reported delay minutes.

National Airspace System
42%
Carrier
40%
Late-arriving aircraft
17%
Security
1%

The largest share of delay minutes, 40%, 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 961 of the 2,382 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 2,382 reported delay minutes.

42% of delay minutes are charged to the National Airspace System: air traffic volume, runway configuration, ground stops. No carrier can price its way out of that, which is why airport choice moves the number here more than carrier choice does. That is 1,000 minutes out of 2,382, against a national NAS share of 21%.

Cancellations are rare at 0.44%, 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 0.6% 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 2,762 miles this is transcontinental flying, and long routes get a quiet structural advantage. Scheduled block time on a flight this length carries more padding in absolute minutes, so a twenty-minute late departure often still becomes an on-time arrival. Read the on-time rate here as slightly flattering next to a short-haul route with the same operational quality.

The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 85.6% on time across 902 flights, 7 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 7 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 902 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor but not enough to pin the rate down tightly, and a single bad week moves it by more than a point. Treat the grade as a rough reading.

What to do with this

Booking Southwest on HNL to LAS

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 902 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 92.6% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 896 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