DALLAS » The bad news for travelers is that U.S. airlines posted terrible on-time numbers and record cancellations in February, as winter storms fouled operations at several large airports.

The good news is that no U.S. flights were stuck on airport tarmacs for more than three hours, the limit set by federal rules.

The U.S. Department of Transportation reported Thursday that only 70.7 percent of domestic flights arrived within 14 minutes of schedule that’s the leeway allowed while still being counted as on time.

The on-time rate fell sharply from the 79.6 percent in February 2013 but was better than January 2014’s 67.7 percent mark.

Hawaiian Airlines, which has been the on-time leader for the past 10 years in a row, maintained its spot at the top with the best on-time performance at 90.1 percent, beating the national average by nearly 20 percentage points.

Airlines reported 23,719 canceled flights, or 5.5 percent of all scheduled departures, the highest rate for February since the government started keeping track in 1995, according to the Transportation Department.

"We faced historically bad weather in February literally the worst we have seen with snow and ice storms nearly every day somewhere in the system," said Jean Medina, spokeswoman for the airline industry trade group Airlines for America. "There were many times when it was simply not safe to operate, driving record cancellations."

Medina said it was remarkable that there were no violations of the tarmac-delay rules, which prohibit ground delays of more than three hours for domestic flights or four hours for international ones.

Hawaiian, which is insulated from most of the mainland’s bad weather, also had the fewest cancellations with four out of 5,418 flights. In other categories, Hawaiian was third for fewest complaints with 0.53 per 100,000 passengers and sixth for fewest mishandled baggage reports with 2.85 per 1,000 passengers.

The Associated Press and Star-Advertiser reporter Dave Segal contributed to this story.