Route reliability record
OGG→KOA
Kahului to Kailua-Kona
- Flights
- 1,460
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Distance
- 84 mi
- Carriers
- 3
This route lands a B+, 3 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in five arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by roughly 40 minutes on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 1,460 OGG to KOA flights, of which Southwest Airlines flew 365 at 86.0% on time.
Southwest Airlines is the most reliable of the three carriers covered here at 86.0% on time across 365 flights.
Key figures
On time
80.3%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 1,457 completed flights
Avg delay
41 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.14%
National rate is 1.81%
Best carrier
Southwest
86.0% on time across 365 flights
These figures cover 1,460 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. On-time means an arrival less than 15 minutes after the scheduled gate time, the same threshold the Department of Transportation uses in its own reports. Cancelled and diverted flights are excluded from the on-time rate and counted separately, which is why the cancellation column matters on its own.
Carrier by carrier
Which airline is most reliable on OGG to KOA
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Southwest Airlines arrives on time 86.0% of the time; Alaska Airlines manages 74.5%. Sample sizes sit next to every figure, because a two-point gap across 543 flights means less than a ten-point one.
| Airline | Flights | On time | Avg delay | Cancelled | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest Airlines | 365 | 86.0% | 42 min | 0.00% | A+ |
| Hawaiian Airlines | 552 | 82.2% | 36 min | 0.18% | B+ |
| Alaska Airlines | 543 | 74.5% | 45 min | 0.18% | C+ |
Southwest leads Alaska by 12 points. Real, but small enough that a better departure time on the weaker carrier can outweigh it.
Best ways to make this trip
The most reliable ways to fly Kahului to Kailua-Kona
Every airline on this route, ranked by how often a scheduled flight actually operated and arrived on time, with its best departure time and most punctual flight number. No nearby airport pair beat these.
| Option | Airline | Success | On time | Cancelled | Best departure | Most punctual flight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. OGG → KOAKahului to Kailua-Kona | Southwest Airlines | 86.0% | 86.0% | 0.00% | 2pm–5pm, Tue | — |
| 2. OGG → KOAKahului to Kailua-Kona | Hawaiian Airlines | 82.1% | 82.2% | 0.18% | 11am–2pm, Sun | — |
| 3. OGG → KOAKahului to Kailua-Kona | Alaska Airlines | 74.4% | 74.5% | 0.18% | 2pm–5pm, Wed | — |
Success is the share of scheduled flights that operated and arrived less than 15 minutes late, so a cancelled flight counts against it. “(route)” means the best time comes from every carrier on the route rather than this airline alone.
Departure window
The best time of day to leave
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 1,460 flights.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am—
- 11am–2pm620 flights77.8%
- 2pm–5pm840 flights82.1%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 70% to 90%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The 2pm–5pm window is the strongest at 82.1% on time. The full set of windows spans 4 points.
Across the year
When delays peak on this route
This route's year swings by 18 points from best month to worst, which is wide. An annual average tells you very little about the week you are actually flying, so read the strip rather than the headline if your dates are fixed.
December is the weak month at 71.8% on time, against 89.5% in August. 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 124 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 86.3% on time and Saturday the weakest at 73.4%. 13 points is a smaller lever than departure hour, but it is free.
Delay causes
Why this route gets delayed
One category carries most of the weight here. Late-arriving aircraft accounts for 67% of the 12,000 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.
- 67%Late-arriving aircraft
- 26%Carrier
- 5%National Airspace System
- 2%Extreme weather
67% 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 12,000 reported delay minutes here, that single category outweighs weather by 30 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 11,853 reported delay minutes.
Cancellations are rare at 0.14%, 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 actually costs
Badly late arrivals are rare here: only 3.3% 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 84 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 2pm–5pm window matters as much as it does.
The return leg is a different operation and performs like one: it runs 86.8% on time across 1,460 flights, 7 points above 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 7 points of difference.
The sample behind these figures is 1,460 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.
Work out the risk of missing a connection in KOA after this flight
What to do with this
Booking this route
Put together: the calendar is the biggest lever here, not the carrier or the hour. August runs 89.5% on time and December 71.8%, a swing of 18 points. If the dates move at all, move them out of December before you think about anything else. 1,457 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Common questions
OGG to KOA questions
How often is OGG to KOA delayed?
About one flight in five arrives at least 15 minutes late, which is the Department of Transportation's definition of a delayed arrival. That works out to 19.7% of the 1,460 flights in this analysis, against 22.4% nationally. Delayed flights are late by roughly 40 minutes on average.
Which airline is most reliable on OGG to KOA?
Southwest Airlines leads at 86.0% on time across 365 flights. Alaska Airlines is at the other end on 74.5%, a gap of 12 points. Sample size matters as much as the percentage: a rate built from a few hundred flights moves around far more than one built from ten thousand.
What time of day has the fewest delays on OGG to KOA?
The 2pm–5pm departure window is the strongest at 82.1% on time. The 11am–2pm window is the weakest at 77.8%, 4 points behind. Later departures inherit delays from earlier flights the same aircraft has already flown, which is why the curve slopes the way it does.
How bad are December delays on OGG to KOA?
December is the weakest month at 71.8% on time, compared with 89.5% in August. Across the year that is 18 points between the best and worst months. Moving flexible dates out of that month is one of the few things that reliably helps.
Related
Where to go next
- KOA to OGG — the return legseparate record
- Southwest Airlines on OGG to KOA86.0%
- Hawaiian Airlines on OGG to KOA82.2%
- Alaska Airlines on OGG to KOA74.5%
- OGG to HNL, a related route84.7%
- HNL to KOA, a related route86.1%
- OGG to LAX, a related route80.8%
- Southwest Airlines on-time record86.0%
- Hawaiian Airlines on-time record82.2%
- Alaska Airlines on-time record74.5%
- Hawaii inter-island flights: how reliable is island hopping?
- Same route, different airline: where the carrier you pick matters most
Direction matters. OGG to KOA and KOA to OGG are scored separately because they are separate operations, with different departure banks and different aircraft. Compare the return leg.
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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.