Hawaiian Airlines Is Now Alaska Airlines: What It Means for Travelers

Matt — Founder. Published April 24, 2026. Updated October 1, 2026. 6 min read.

Figures checked against DelayGuard BTS tables on 2026-10-01. Canonical page: Hawaiian Airlines delay and cancellation rates.

The End of an Independent Hawaiian Airlines

On April 22, 2026, Hawaiian Airlines ceased to exist as an independent airline. The HA flight code — in use for 95 years — disappeared from booking systems, boarding passes, and departure boards. Every flight previously sold as Hawaiian Airlines now operates under Alaska Airlines (AS). The Pualani logo remains on the tail of the aircraft for now, but operationally, legally, and commercially, Hawaiian Airlines is Alaska Airlines.

This is not a sudden development. Alaska Air Group announced the acquisition in December 2023. Shareholders approved it in April 2024. The Department of Justice cleared it in August 2024, the Department of Transportation followed in September 2024, and the deal closed on September 18, 2024. What happened on April 22, 2026 was the final operational milestone: the switchover of Hawaiian's reservation system to Alaska's platform, the retirement of all HA-coded flights from new bookings, and Hawaiian's admission into the oneworld alliance under Alaska's membership.

The integration took 18 months from close to system cutover. Hawaiian's 2025 losses totalled approximately $189 million — around $518,000 per day — which compressed Alaska Air Group's 2025 net income from $395 million to $100 million. The combined entity is now the fifth-largest US carrier by passengers.

What Changed on DelayGuard

If you search for Hawaiian Airlines on DelayGuard today, you will find the airline listed — but two things are different.

First, the IATA code now shows AS, not HA. A small info indicator explains why: Hawaiian now operates under Alaska Airlines. This is the accurate, bookable code. Searching for HA in any airline booking system returns nothing; AS is where the flights live.

Second, the predict button on the Hawaiian Airlines page now routes you to a prediction using Alaska's airline profile. This matters because the prediction engine uses the airline code to pull base delay rates, hub dynamics, and operational characteristics. Running a prediction as "HA" would produce results calibrated to a carrier that no longer schedules, staffs, or dispatches flights independently. AS reflects the operational reality.

The Hawaiian Airlines historical data — an 18.9% delay rate in BTS data for January 2023 to December 2025 (below the 21.2% national rate), inter-island precision, trans-Pacific route profiles — remains on the page as reference. That record is real and valuable context for understanding what you're flying into. But for forward-looking predictions on routes to and from Hawaii, you are now predicting an Alaska Airlines operation.

What This Means for the Model

This is where it gets technically interesting.

The ML model was trained on BTS data from 2023 to mid-2025. Hawaiian Airlines (HA) has a below-average delay rate of 18.9% in BTS data for January 2023 to December 2025, driven structurally by Hawaii's stable Pacific weather, the absence of mainland convective patterns, and the inter-island operation's precision turnaround discipline.

Alaska Airlines (AS) carries a different profile in the model — a model base delay rate of approximately 19.6% (BTS shows 21.6% for January 2023 to December 2025), reflecting its Pacific Northwest hub exposure, Seattle's marine layer fog, and a broader route network with more mainland weather variability.

When you now predict a flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles, the model receives the AS airline code. The route-level priors — trained on the actual HNL→LAX historical delay distribution — remain intact regardless of carrier code. Those priors are the dominant signal in the model, accounting for over 76% of total feature importance. The airline code contributes a smaller adjustment on top.

In practice, HNL-originating predictions may show a marginally higher base risk estimate than they would have under HA, because AS carries slightly more baseline delay loading. However, the route priors will anchor the prediction to Hawaii-based operations' actual historical performance — which has been and remains exceptional. Over time, as Alaska accumulates BTS-reported performance data for the routes it inherited from Hawaiian, the model will naturally calibrate. The HA→AS transition is one the training data will absorb in the 2026 reporting cycle.

For travelers booking routes to or from Hawaii: the operational change is largely invisible at the gate. The aircraft are the same, many of the crews are the same, and the Hawaiian brand remains on the livery. What has changed is who is running the airline — and our model now reflects that accurately.

Related

Sources: Alaska Air Group press releases, Beat of Hawaii, Simple Flying, BTS TranStats on-time performance data 2023–2025.

All articles | Flight delay prediction