Carrier route record

ASHNL→LIH

Alaska Airlines · Honolulu to Lihue

Flights: 2,929
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 LIH lands a B, level with the national rate of 77.6%. Roughly one flight in four arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by about 40 minutes on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 2,929 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Southwest Airlines, flew 1,770 at 91.8% on time.

The US average over the same twelve months is 77.6%, so there is little to separate Alaska on HNL to LIH from the country as a whole. The variation that matters here is internal: which carrier, and what time of day.

On time

77.7%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,853 completed flights

Avg delay

40 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

2.53%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

84.9%

Every carrier on HNL to LIH, 7,755 flights

These figures cover 2,929 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 LIH

Alaska flew 2,929 of the 7,755 flights on HNL to LIH, about 38% of it. Its 77.7% on time is 7 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 84.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 91.8% to Alaska at 77.7%.

The two carriers here are closely matched: 4 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 LIH
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Southwest Airlines	1,770	91.8%	56 min	0.45%	A+
Hawaiian Airlines	3,056	87.6%	38 min	0.85%	A+
Alaska Airlines (this page)	2,929	77.7%	40 min	2.53%	B

No carrier stands out. Southwest tops the table at 91.8%, 4 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 26 points, against 4 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am482 flights91.6%
8am–11am615 flights88.1%
11am–2pm525 flights66.9%
2pm–5pm581 flights65.6%
5pm–8pm562 flights75.9%
8pm–5am164 flights80.9%

Scale runs 55% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 91.6% of the time, against 65.6% for the afternoon window. That is 26 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 615 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Alaska on HNL to LIH through the year

Jan–Mar 20261,475 flights76.3%
Apr–Jun 20261,454 flights79.2%

Scale runs 70% to 85%. 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 77.7% on time across 2,929 flights.

Split by quarter, Alaska on HNL to LIH logged 1,475 flights in Jan–Mar 2026 and 1,454 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 77.7% annual figure is the one to use.

Across the week, Wednesday is the strongest day at 84.1% on time and Friday the weakest at 67.8%. 16 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 45% of the 25,000 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
45%
Late-arriving aircraft
38%
Extreme weather
9%
National Airspace System
7%
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 25,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 4 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 25,441 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 45%, 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 12,000 of the 25,000 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations run at 2.53%, against 1.81% nationally. That is about one flight in 40 cancelled outright. A cancelled flight is invisible in every on-time figure on this page, so the punctuality numbers above describe only the flights that actually operated.

Connections and stage length

What a delay here costs

Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 4.0% 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 102 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 76.9% on time across 2,932 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 2,929 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 LIH

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 26 points, which is the most any booking decision can do. 2,853 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