March 2, 2021 / For the seventeenth consecutive year, a record hardly matchable by any other airline in its own Country, Hawaiian Airlines (HA) clintched top spot among US carriers in point of On-Time Performance (OTP) for the year 2020.

According to official regulation, a flight is considered ‘on-time’ if it takes-off within the fifteen minutes following its scheduled time of departure (STD) and if it lands within the fifteen minutes following its scheduled time of arrival (STA). For obvious reasons, in the official rankings only the effective time of arrival is considered.

Considering the interval spanning January-December 2020, 87.5% of Hawaiian Airlines’ flights landed on-time, the best performance among US carriers. Delta Airlines (DL) ranked as a close second, with 87.2%, followed by ultra low-cost carrier Spirit Airlines (NK) at 86.6%. Allegiant Air (G4) was the last among the ten carriers listed in the ranking by the US Department of Transportation (DOT) at 71.3%.

Hawaiian Airlines lived a complicated year because of the Covid pandemic: even more complicated than its rivals because of the lockdown which isolated the State of Hawaii from the rest of the world, including continental US, for more than three months in the spring-summer 2020.

During this period the Honolulu-based airline flew only a limited intra-island operation. After the ‘re-opening’ of the archipelago, HA gradually restarted its US network, reaching a total of 16 cities served on mainland US by the end of 2020, with Ontario (ONT), Austin (AUS) and Orlando (MCO) ready to start in the very first months of 2021.

International flights to Japan and South Korea have been restarted in the final quarter of 2021, as well. The carrier has plans to add the Boeing 787-9 to its fleet during 2021. (Photo Matteo Legnani)