Hawaii’s Big Island may be the next airline network planner battleground.
American Airlines filed plans over the weekend to relaunch service between Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) and Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keahole (KOA) beginning Nov. 20, as first seen in Cirium schedules and later confirmed by a carrier spokesperson.
American’s Dallas-to-Kona route will operate seasonally through Feb. 28, 2026. Note that American will operate daily flights on this 3,724-mile route from Nov. 20, 2025, through Jan. 6, 2026, before taking a short six-week hiatus until resuming daily flights again Feb. 12, 2026.
The airline will deploy a 234-seat Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner featuring 20 Flagship Business pods, 28 premium economy recliners, 48 extra-legroom Main Cabin Extra seats and 138 standard economy seats on the route.
The Fort Worth, Texas-based carrier last operated this route in January 2022, according to Cirium schedules.
American’s plan to relaunch its Dallas-to-Kona service follows another major expansion on the Big Island.
Last week, Delta Air Lines announced that it, too, would add a new Kona route, this time from Salt Lake City. Delta’s service will operate using a Boeing 767-300ER.
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The Big Island may not be as popular with tourists (or airline network planners) as Oahu and Maui, but seeing all the attention it has gotten from the airlines over the past few days is interesting.
While there may not be a sudden uptick in demand for travel to the Big Island, carriers need to find a home for their wide-body jets during the winter season. That’s when transatlantic traffic declines and airlines have spare capacity on their biggest planes.
In recent years, Oceania has proved to be a popular spot to send twin-aisle planes during the Northern Hemisphere’s winter season, as have some hot spots in Africa, like Marrakech, Morocco.
But with its appeal to sunseekers, Hawaii has long been a popular bet for airline network planners. As such, it’ll be interesting to see how all the new service performs.
In fact, this weekend, American also added a second daily flight from DFW to Maui’s Kahului Airport (OGG) during the peak winter season. This is seemingly another play to deploy wide-body aircraft on the most appropriate routes this winter.
Ultimately, flyers will be the winners, as new airline service means more competition and, ultimately, more frequent fare wars and upgrade and award availability.
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