Hawaiian's Mainland Flights Have a Rough November

Earlier today, we talked about Delta’s on-time problems in November, but there was another airline that had problems in the month, despite what the results say at first glance. That airline was Hawaiian.

At first glance, Hawaiian looks great. It was number one among all reporting airlines with 89.6 percent of flights arriving on time. But Hawaiian is usually in the 90 percent range, so I decided to look a little deeper to see why they’d fallen. It appears that their mainland operation had some serious problems.

Interisland flights operated with stellar on-time performance, but if we isolate the west coast airports, Hawaiian didn’t even beat 60 percent on time. Some cities were far worse. Phoenix’s daily flight from Honolulu arrived on-time only 30 percent of the time. There weren’t many weather problems in November, so it must have been something else.

We’ll want to watch Hawaiian’s widebody operation closely over the next couple months to see if things improve.