It took Nainoa Thompson five months to captain the sailing canoe Hokule‘a on a 1985 voyage from Hawaii to Waitangi, New Zealand.

That trip reintroduced the practice of celestial navigation to the Maori culture.

On Wednesday, Thompson and six other members from that 14-person crew needed just nine hours to fly from Hono­lulu to Auckland, New Zealand, on another historic trip that marked Hawaiian Airlines’ inaugural flight to that country.

For Thompson, executive director of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, it was like going home.

"It was an extraordinary time," Thompson recalled of the voyage 28 years ago. "The Maori people welcomed us and actually proclaimed that we were their sixth tribe — not guests but actually family. That’s what this trip brings back. It brings back the memory of relationships that are deep and based on family values. So to some degree, it’s like flying home."

With Wednesday’s inaugural flight to New Zealand on a 294-seat Airbus A330-200 aircraft, the state’s largest carrier has now introduced service to three destinations in three countries in the past six months. Hawaiian recently began service to Brisbane, Australia, and Sapporo, Japan.

Hawaiian is beginning New Zealand service with three flights a week. The carrier’s expansion will continue in the upcoming months when it starts service to Sendai, Japan, in June and to Taipei in July.

"Today’s flight marks a continuation of a strategy of growing our network … and diversifying," Hawaiian Chief Commercial Officer Peter Ingram said. "It’s something that I don’t think any of us at the company even would have thought possible or likely three years ago."

Before Hawaiian launched service to Tokyo-Haneda in November 2010, international routes represented just under 10 percent of the airline’s revenue. Now it is up to 35 percent and the airline has nearly as many international destinations as it does mainland routes.

New Zealand has taken a back seat to Australia in recent years in bringing visitors to Hawaii. The number of people visiting the islands from New Zealand is down 75 percent from 1990 when there were 100,826 arrivals. That was when United, Continental and American airlines, as well as Air New Zealand, all served the Hawaii market. Now only Air Zealand, with three flights a week, flies to Honolulu from New Zealand.

But that number likely will grow now that Hawaiian is joining Air New Zealand in offering nonstop flights to the islands.

Visitor arrivals from New Zealand jumped 23.1 percent in 2012 to 25,509 from 20,730 in 2011, according to Hawaii Tourism Authority data.

In the first month of this year, New Zealand visitor arrivals were up 84.9 percent to 2,518 from 1,362 in the year-earlier period.