Kona Airport’s Only Runway Cracked Again, Its Fifth Failure Since 2024

On September 3, 2026, Hawaii’s Department of Transportation shut down the sole runway at Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keāhole after inspectors found a fresh crack in the pavement. Six inbound flights were affected, and three diverted to Maui before crews patched the surface.

One Runway, No Backup

Kona has a single runway, Runway 17-35, laid across an old lava field on Hawaii’s Big Island roughly 30 years ago. There is no second runway to absorb the traffic when it closes, so every closure stops the airport entirely.

HDOT said the crack was found around 1:35 p.m. local time. Three of the six inbound flights diverted to Kahului Airport on Maui, about 180 miles away, while crews patched the pavement. The runway reopened around 3 p.m., then closed again overnight, from 11:30 p.m. to 5 a.m., for a more permanent repair.

A $120 Million Fix That Hasn’t Caught Up Yet

This is the fifth time Kona’s runway has cracked since early 2024. Beat of Hawaii has reported that HDOT flagged pavement deformation on the runway as far back as 2018, with assessments and patches following that year.

A January 2024 crack forced another closure, and HDOT Director Ed Sniffen told Big Island Now that trapped water was pulling the pavement apart: “We found layers of water that helped cause that sheering.”

That pattern of failures pushed the FAA to award Hawaii $64.7 million in August 2024 toward a roughly $120 million rehabilitation of the runway’s asphalt and concrete surface. “This airfield improvement project is more than just installing new pavement, it’s ensuring reliability for residents and businesses that depend on the airport’s only runway to stay connected,” Sniffen said at the time.

Construction began that November, scheduled mostly overnight to limit disruption, with HDOT targeting completion around April 2026, according to Beat of Hawaii’s reporting on the project. Five months past that target, the runway cracked again.

Kona is one of two Hawaii airports HDOT has singled out for this kind of chronic pavement failure; Lihue’s runway is undergoing a comparable rehabilitation for its own long-running structural issues. Both share the same underlying problem: aging pavement laid directly over porous, uneven volcanic rock, which drains and shifts unevenly under repeated heat and rain cycles.

A full repaving does not happen overnight, or even in one dry season. Crews resurface a runway in sections, working around the clock schedule commercial flights still need, so a project can span more than a year even once funding and design are settled. That leaves stretches of older pavement sitting for months after work has already started elsewhere on the same runway, which is one reason a rehabilitation already underway does not rule out another crack before it is finished.

For a single-runway airport like Kona, that math matters more than it would at a hub with several runways to fall back on. Every closure, whether it lasts 90 minutes or a full night, has nowhere else on the field to send arriving traffic, so the nearest alternative is another island entirely.