Carrier route record
WNHNL→SAN
Southwest Airlines · Honolulu to San Diego
- Flights
- 729
- 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 SAN earns a B+. More than four flights in five arrive inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 7 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs roughly 35 minutes. That rests on 729 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Alaska Airlines, flew 551 at 75.4% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Southwest's HNL to SAN record is 7 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 68 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
84.4%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 723 completed flights
Avg delay
37 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.14%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
77.8%
Every carrier on HNL to SAN, 1,765 flights
These figures cover 729 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 6 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 SAN
Southwest flew 729 of the 1,765 flights on HNL to SAN, about 41% of it. Its 84.4% on time is 7 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 77.8%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 84.4% to Hawaiian at 70.5%.
The two carriers here are closely matched: 5 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) | 729 | 84.4% | 37 min | 0.14% | B+ |
| Alaska Airlines | 551 | 75.4% | 43 min | 1.63% | B |
| Hawaiian Airlines | 485 | 70.5% | 72 min | 0.82% | C+ |
No carrier stands out. Alaska tops the table at 75.4%, 5 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 16 points, against 5 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.
- 5am–8am1 flights—
- 8am–11am363 flights87.0%
- 11am–2pm174 flights86.5%
- 2pm–5pm73 flights70.8%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am118 flights82.1%
Scale runs 60% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
Book the morning departure. Flights leaving between 8am–11am arrive on time 87.0% of the time, against 70.8% for the afternoon window. That is 16 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 363 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on HNL to SAN through the year
December is the weak month at 62.3% on time, against 93.5% in August. Winter delays cluster: a single storm system can account for most of a month's shortfall, so an average December hides both very good weeks and genuinely unflyable days. January was the busiest month here, with 62 flights.
Across the week, Saturday is the strongest day at 88.5% on time and Friday the weakest at 76.7%. 12 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 4,225 reported delay minutes.
- 42%National Airspace System
- 37%Carrier
- 17%Late-arriving aircraft
- 3%Security
- 2%Extreme weather
The largest share of delay minutes, 37%, 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 1,547 of the 4,225 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 4,225 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 1,755 minutes out of 4,225, against a national NAS share of 21%.
Cancellations are rare at 0.14%, 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 2.5% 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 2,614 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 runs 81.8% on time across 729 flights, within 3 points of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 729 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 SAN
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 729 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 84.4% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 723 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- HNL to SAN, every carrier
- Southwest on SAN to HNL, the return leg
- Alaska Airlines on HNL to SAN75.4%
- Hawaiian Airlines on HNL to SAN70.5%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Daniel K. Inouye International (HNL) delay statistics
- San Diego International (SAN) delay statistics
- The best time of day to fly, according to 7.04 million flight records
- Worst months to fly in the US, ranked by the data
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.