Carrier route record

WNLIH→HNL

Southwest Airlines · Lihue to Honolulu

Flights: 1,770
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 23%
Carriers: 3

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

Southwest on LIH 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 17 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. When something does go wrong the average delay runs a little over an hour. That rests on 1,770 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Hawaiian Airlines, flew 3,057 at 85.0% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Southwest's LIH to HNL record is 17 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 172 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

94.8%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,760 completed flights

Avg delay

69 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.56%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

84.2%

Every carrier on LIH to HNL, 7,759 flights

These figures cover 1,770 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 13 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 LIH to HNL

Southwest flew 1,770 of the 7,759 flights on LIH to HNL, about 23% of it. Its 94.8% on time is 11 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 84.2%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 94.8% to Alaska at 76.9%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Hawaiian Airlines arrives on time 85.0% of the time; Alaska Airlines manages 76.9%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 2,932 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on LIH to HNL
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Southwest Airlines (this page)	1,770	94.8%	69 min	0.56%	A+
Hawaiian Airlines	3,057	85.0%	41 min	0.88%	A+
Alaska Airlines	2,932	76.9%	47 min	2.86%	B

Hawaiian leads Alaska by 8 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 flights98.4%
8am–11am365 flights96.4%
11am–2pm365 flights92.9%
2pm–5pm364 flights92.8%
5pm–8pm359 flights93.8%
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: 98.4% on time for the 5am–8am window against 92.8% 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 LIH to HNL through the year

Darker means more delays. Figures are on-time percentages.October best, March worst

October is the best month on the calendar at 99.3% on time. Shoulder season thins the schedule and takes the summer weather with it, and the operation gets its margin back. January was the busiest month here, with 151 flights.

Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 98.5% on time and Friday the weakest at 90.3%. 8 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 50% of the 6,368 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
50%
Carrier
32%
National Airspace System
17%
Security
0%

50% 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 6,368 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 50 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 6,368 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 98.4% on time here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.56%, 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 2.0% 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 is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 91.8% on time across 1,770 flights, 3 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 3 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 LIH to HNL

Put together: the carrier matters more than the hour here. Hawaiian Airlines at 85.0% against Alaska Airlines at 76.9% is 8 points of difference, while the spread across departure windows is only 6 points. Choose the operator, then the time. 1,760 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