Carrier route record

WNOGG→HNL

Southwest Airlines · Kahului to Honolulu

Flights: 2,861
Period: July 2025 to June 2026
Share of route: 28%
Carriers: 3

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

Southwest on OGG 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 roughly 50 minutes. That rests on 2,861 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Hawaiian Airlines, flew 3,810 at 85.8% on time.

Set against the rest of the country, Southwest's OGG to HNL record is 17 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 165 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.

On time

94.1%

Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 2,842 completed flights

Avg delay

52 min

Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights

Cancelled

0.66%

National rate is 1.81%

Whole route

84.7%

Every carrier on OGG to HNL, 10,178 flights

These figures cover 2,861 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 OGG to HNL

Southwest flew 2,861 of the 10,178 flights on OGG to HNL, about 28% of it. Its 94.1% on time is 9 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 84.7%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 94.1% to Alaska at 75.8%.

The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Hawaiian Airlines arrives on time 85.8% of the time; Alaska Airlines manages 75.8%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 3,507 flights means less than a ten-point one.

On-time performance by carrier on OGG to HNL
Airline	Flights	On time	Avg delay	Cancelled	Grade
Southwest Airlines (this page)	2,861	94.1%	52 min	0.66%	A+
Hawaiian Airlines	3,810	85.8%	40 min	0.89%	A+
Alaska Airlines	3,507	75.8%	43 min	1.74%	B

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 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 2,861 flights.

5am–8am673 flights97.5%
8am–11am367 flights95.6%
11am–2pm456 flights94.3%
2pm–5pm640 flights90.3%
5pm–8pm721 flights93.3%
8pm–5am4 flights—

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

The early departures do better, though not dramatically: 97.5% on time for the 5am–8am window against 90.3% for 2pm–5pm. Worth taking if the schedule allows, not worth an extra connection. The 5pm–8pm window is the busiest, with 721 flights scheduled in it.

Across the year

Southwest on OGG to HNL through the year

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

November is the best month on the calendar at 98.7% 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 244 flights.

Across the week, Monday is the strongest day at 97.4% on time and Saturday the weakest at 90.7%. 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 8,813 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
46%
Carrier
36%
National Airspace System
17%
Security
1%

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 8,813 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 46 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 8,813 reported delay minutes.

The largest share of delay minutes, 36%, 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 3,129 of the 8,813 delay minutes reported here.

Cancellations are rare at 0.66%, 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 1.3% 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 101 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 runs 92.3% on time across 2,861 flights, within 2 points of this direction. The two legs are scored separately because they usually differ; on this city pair they happen not to.

The sample behind these figures is 2,861 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 OGG to HNL

Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. November runs 98.7% on time and March 85.8%, a swing of 13 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of March before you think about anything else. 2,842 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