Carrier route record

HAHNL→SEA

Hawaiian Airlines · Honolulu to Seattle

Flights: 727
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 25%
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 SEA draws a C+. About one flight in three arrives at least 15 minutes late, and the typical late arrival is a little over an hour behind schedule. Build slack into anything you connect to. That rests on 727 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Delta Air Lines, flew 789 at 89.6% on time.

The national on-time rate over the same period is 77.6%, so Hawaiian on HNL to SEA runs 12 points behind the country as a whole. Across a thousand flights that is about 116 extra late arrivals.

On time

66.0%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 721 completed flights

Avg delay

81 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.55%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

75.2%

Every carrier on HNL to SEA, 2,942 flights

These figures cover 727 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. Beyond the headline rate, 9.4% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule. That is the number that wrecks a connection, and it is not visible in an on-time percentage alone.

Carrier by carrier

Hawaiian against every carrier on HNL to SEA

Hawaiian flew 727 of the 2,942 flights on HNL to SEA, about 25% of it. Its 66.0% on time is 9 points worse than the route as a whole, which runs 75.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is last of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Delta at 89.6% to Hawaiian at 66.0%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Delta Air Lines arrives on time 89.6% of the time; Alaska Airlines manages 71.9%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 1,426 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on HNL to SEA
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Delta Air Lines	789	89.6%	88 min	1.39%	A
Alaska Airlines	1,426	71.9%	62 min	0.84%	C+
Hawaiian Airlines (this page)	727	66.0%	81 min	0.55%	C+

The spread between Delta and Alaska is 18 points, wide enough that it should decide the booking. On a hundred trips that is 18 more arrivals inside the on-time window.

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 25 points, against 18 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am40 flights65.0%
8am–11am143 flights59.2%
11am–2pm140 flights50.7%
2pm–5pm43 flights60.5%
5pm–8pm—
8pm–5am361 flights75.4%

Scale runs 40% to 80%. 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 50.7% on time against 75.4% 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 8pm–5am window is the busiest, with 361 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Hawaiian on HNL to SEA through the year

Jul–Sep 2025368 flights67.8%
Oct–Dec 2025359 flights64.1%

Scale runs 55% to 75%. 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 66.0% on time across 727 flights.

Split by quarter, Hawaiian on HNL to SEA logged 368 flights in Jul–Sep 2025 and 359 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 66.0% annual figure is the one to use.

Across the week, Friday is the strongest day at 70.0% on time and Thursday the weakest at 58.3%. 12 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 82% of the 20,000 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
82%
Late-arriving aircraft
17%
National Airspace System
0%
Extreme weather
0%
Security
0%

The largest share of delay minutes, 82%, 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 16,000 of the 20,000 delay minutes reported here. The split is drawn from 19,742 reported delay minutes.

Cancellations are rare at 0.55%, 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

For anyone connecting, the number to weigh is not the on-time rate but the tail behind it. 9.4% of arrivals land a full hour or more behind schedule, against 8.1% nationally. A 45-minute layover does not survive that, and no amount of walking quickly changes it. Ninety minutes is the honest minimum here, and two hours if the onward flight is on a separate ticket.

At 2,677 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 57.5% on time across 727 flights, 9 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 9 points of difference.

One caution: this is a thin sample. 727 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 Hawaiian on HNL to SEA

Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 727 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 66.0% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 721 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