Carrier route record
WNOGG→LIH
Southwest Airlines · Kahului to Lihue
- Flights
- 365
- Period
- July 2025 to June 2026
- Share of route
- 25%
- 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 LIH lands a B+, 5 points better than the national rate of 77.6%. About one flight in six arrives 15 minutes late or worse, and those flights are late by roughly 45 minutes on average. That is a workable record, not a spotless one. That rests on 365 flights. The strongest carrier on the route with a full sample, Hawaiian Airlines, flew 552 at 77.1% on time.
Set against the rest of the country, Southwest's OGG to LIH record is 5 points better than the US average of 77.6%. That gap is worth roughly 51 fewer late arrivals for every thousand flights.
Key figures
On time
82.7%
Arrivals under 15 minutes late, of 365 completed flights
Avg delay
46 min
Across delayed arrivals only, not all flights
Cancelled
0.00%
National rate is 1.81%
Whole route
73.6%
Every carrier on OGG to LIH, 1,460 flights
These figures cover 365 flights between July 2025 and June 2026. The median arrival is 6 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 LIH
Southwest flew 365 of the 1,460 flights on OGG to LIH, about 25% of it. Its 82.7% on time is 9 points better than the route as a whole, which runs 73.6%. Ranked by on-time rate it is first of three carriers on the route, where the range runs from Southwest at 82.7% to Alaska at 63.8%.
The choice of carrier is not cosmetic here. Hawaiian Airlines arrives on time 77.1% of the time; Alaska Airlines manages 63.8%. 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 (this page) | 365 | 82.7% | 46 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| Hawaiian Airlines | 552 | 77.1% | 39 min | 0.00% | B+ |
| Alaska Airlines | 543 | 63.8% | 44 min | 0.00% | D+ |
The spread between Hawaiian and Alaska is 13 points, wide enough that it should decide the booking. On a hundred trips that is 13 more arrivals inside the on-time window.
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 365 flights.
- 5am–8am—
- 8am–11am—
- 11am–2pm276 flights81.2%
- 2pm–5pm89 flights87.6%
- 5pm–8pm—
- 8pm–5am—
Scale runs 75% to 95%. Rows with fewer than 30 flights show a dash.
The weak window here is the middle of the day, not the evening: 11am–2pm runs 81.2% on time against 87.6% for 2pm–5pm. That shape usually means a departure bank rather than an accumulating delay, so the recovery later in the afternoon is real rather than noise. The 11am–2pm window is the busiest, with 276 flights scheduled in it.
Across the year
Southwest on OGG to LIH through the year
November is the best month on the calendar at 100.0% 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 31 flights.
Across the week, Tuesday is the strongest day at 88.7% on time and Thursday the weakest at 75.0%. 14 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 2,922 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.
- 50%Late-arriving aircraft
- 35%Carrier
- 15%National Airspace System
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 2,922 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 2,922 reported delay minutes.
The largest share of delay minutes, 35%, 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 1,026 of the 2,922 delay minutes reported here.
Cancellations are rare at 0.00%, below the national 1.81% and low enough to earn the plus on the grade. Almost no flights are 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 3.8% 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 202 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 runs 84.3% on time across 365 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.
One caution: this is a thin sample. 365 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor but not enough to pin the rate down tightly, and a single bad week moves it by more than a point. Treat the grade as a rough reading.
What to do with this
Booking Southwest on OGG to LIH
Put together: treat all of this as provisional. 365 flights over twelve months is enough to clear this site's floor and not enough to be confident to better than a couple of points. The 82.7% headline is the most reliable number on the page; the hour and month splits below it are built on a few dozen flights each. 365 completed flights over 12 months sit behind that.
Related
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.