Carrier route record

WNITO→HNL

Southwest Airlines · Hilo to Honolulu

Flights: 1,857
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 29%
Carriers: 3

Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.

Southwest on ITO to HNL earns an A+. Nearly every flight arrives inside the 15-minute window the DOT uses to define an on-time arrival, which puts it 16 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 1,857 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Hawaiian Airlines, flew 2,214 at 84.9% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Southwest's ITO to HNL record is 16 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 163 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

93.9%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,839 completed flights

Avg delay

59 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.97%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

83.9%

Every carrier on ITO to HNL, 6,337 flights

These figures cover 1,857 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 10 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 ITO to HNL

Southwest flew 1,857 of the 6,337 flights on ITO to HNL, about 29% of it. Its 93.9% on time is 10 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 83.9%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 93.9% to Alaska at 74.5%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Hawaiian Airlines arrives on time 84.9% of the time; Alaska Airlines manages 74.5%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 2,266 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on ITO to HNL
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Southwest Airlines (this page)	1,857	93.9%	59 min	0.97%	A+
Hawaiian Airlines	2,214	84.9%	37 min	0.50%	B+
Alaska Airlines	2,266	74.5%	43 min	2.03%	C

Hawaiian leads Alaska by 10 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.

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 12 points, against 10 points between the best and worst carrier. Each bar is the on-time rate for flights scheduled inside that window.

5am–8am365 flights98.6%
8am–11am366 flights98.1%
11am–2pm366 flights94.7%
2pm–5pm366 flights91.2%
5pm–8pm391 flights87.1%
8pm–5am3 flights—

Scale runs 80% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.

Book the early departure. Flights leaving between 5am–8am arrive on time 98.6% of the time, against 87.1% for the evening window. That is 12 points of difference for no extra money, and it comes from the same aircraft having had no earlier flight to fall behind on. The 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 391 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Southwest on ITO to HNL through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.September best, February worst

February is the weak month at 88.6% on time, against 98.0% in September. 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. July was the busiest month here, with 181 flights.

Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 96.6% on time and Friday the weakest at 89.3%. 7 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 65% of the 6,469 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.

Late-arriving aircraft
65%
Carrier
23%
National Airspace System
12%

65% 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 6,469 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 65 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 6,469 reported delay minutes.

The practical consequence: the 5am–8am departure is the one that starts clean. Its aircraft has no earlier leg to be late from, which is exactly why that window shows 98.6% on time here.

Cancellations sit at 0.97% 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 1.5% 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 216 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 89.6% on time across 1,857 flights, 4 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 4 points of difference.

The sample behind these figures is 1,857 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 ITO to HNL

Put together: avoid the 5pm–8pm departure. It runs 87.1% on time against 98.6% for the 5am–8am slot, and that 12 points is the largest single thing you control here. Hawaiian Airlines is the strongest operator if the fares are close. 1,839 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