From the lower 48 you can ship to AK and HI using "Ground". Yes, those packages will go on an airplane, and no, they don't get the air surcharge; they get the ground surcharge.
But they also both have additional surcharges, similar to, but larger than a rural surcharge.
Depending on location, NDA may take 2 days, and 2DA may take 3 days.
USPS is always less expensive, and by quite a bit because of the surcharges, but Priority Mail estimated TIT is sometimes longer than UPS Ground, and Parcel Post estimated TIT can reach to more than two weeks.
The difference in price between Ground and 2DA isn't as much as you might think. It's a smaller gap than you'd usually see between Ground and 3DS going across the country, so if the customer isn't inclined to recoil at the Ground price to AK or HI, upselling them to 2DA, even if it takes 3 days, is usually an easy sell.
And p228 is correct: No ORM-D even for "Ground" because they go on a plane (or planes).
And make sure that anything going to HI is packaged very, very well. They are brutal at Ontario. They're not just playing Tetris with the boxes. You'd swear that they're jamming boxes in the containers with hydroiic presses when they're going "Ground". The stuff we send 2DA and NDA shows up in fine shape, but I get complaints about the condition that nearly every Ground package to HI shows up in. Almost as bad as shipping to Mexico.