Carrier route record
WNKOA→HNL
Southwest Airlines · Kailua-Kona to Honolulu
- Flights
- 1,770
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 24%
- Carriers
- 3
Historical statistics for July 2025 to June 2026, not live status. For today’s flights, check with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest on KOA 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 18 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs about an hour. That rests on 1,770 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Hawaiian Airlines, flew 2,727 at 86.4% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Southwest's KOA to HNL record is 18 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 177 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
95.3%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,749 completed flights
Avg delay
59 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
1.19%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
85.1%
Every carrier on KOA to HNL, 7,280 flights
These figures cover 1,770 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 11 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 KOA to HNL
Southwest flew 1,770 of the 7,280 flights on KOA to HNL, about 24% of it. Its 95.3% on time is 10 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 85.1%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 95.3% to Alaska at 77.4%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Hawaiian Airlines arrives on time 86.4% of the time; Alaska Airlines manages 77.4%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 2,783 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlines (this page) | 1,770 | 95.3% | 59 min | 1.19% | A |
| Hawaiian Airlines | 2,727 | 86.4% | 43 min | 0.66% | A+ |
| Alaska Airlines | 2,783 | 77.4% | 46 min | 1.80% | B |
Hawaiian leads Alaska by 9 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 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 1,770 flights.
- 5am–8am314 flights97.7%
- 8am–11am365 flights96.3%
- 11am–2pm365 flights94.5%
- 2pm–5pm364 flights93.1%
- 5pm–8pm359 flights94.9%
- 8pm–5am3 flights—
Scale runs 85% to 100%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The early departures do better, though not dramatically: 97.7% on time for the 5am–8am window against 93.1% for 2pm–5pm. Worth taking if the schedule allows, not worth an extra connection. The 8am–11am window is the busiest, with 365 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on KOA to HNL through the year
December is the weak month at 90.1% on time, against 98.6% in April. 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 151 flights.
Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 98.5% on time and Saturday the weakest at 91.8%. 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 46% of the 4,893 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.
- 46%Late-arriving aircraft
- 33%Carrier
- 18%National Airspace System
- 3%Extreme weather
46% 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 4,893 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 17 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 4,893 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 97.7% on time here.
Cancellations sit at 1.19% 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 163 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 90.3% on time across 1,770 flights, 5 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 5 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,770 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 KOA to HNL
Put together: the carrier matters more than the hour here. Hawaiian Airlines at 86.4% against Alaska Airlines at 77.4% is 9 points of difference, while the spread across departure windows is only 5 points. Choose the operator, then the time. 1,749 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
Where to go next
- KOA to HNL, every carrier
- Southwest on HNL to KOA, the return leg
- Hawaiian Airlines on KOA to HNL86.4%
- Alaska Airlines on KOA to HNL77.4%
- Southwest Airlines network-wide record
- Daniel K. Inouye International (HNL) delay statistics
- Hawaii inter-island flights: how reliable is island hopping?
- Why the first flight of the morning is statistically safest
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.