Retrospective on Aloha Airlines (1946-2008)

It’s been over half a year – 7 months on Friday – since the demise of Aloha Airlines, and I still experience some grief at this loss of a local airline in Hawaii; it felt like I had lost a close friend. So you might imagine how visibly upset I was yesterday when @GoAirlines started to “Follow” me on Twitter as part of a mass add/follow, akin to email spamming. So upset was I at this that I composed a very nasty Tweet to post to the Twitterverse, but decided against it and went with this instead, which I think reflected my personality better:

exbor: misses Aloha Airlines, the airline that I grew up on. Support Hawaiian or Island Air. There’s no ALOHA in the HAWAIIAN skies – GO! figure.

It’s not just that mass adds/follows are a very ineffective way to market your company on Twitter, unless you want to get people irritated and upset with your brand.  After that add yesterday, many of the feelings I felt beginning March 30 (when Aloha announced it was halting passenger service after nearly 62 years in service) – including disbelief, anger, and grief – resurfaced.  Someone with similar sentiments wrote about how he felt at the time.  Watching the TV news coverage and reading about it online, I actually teared up as the coverage wore on – and I don’t cry for anything.  I even thought about taking the day off and flying somewhere – anywhere – just to be on one of the last flights that Aloha flew.  And it’s not like I had been flying Aloha much anymore; the last time I flew with them was in 2005 for a job. I stopped flying them regularly in early 2001, in favor of Hawaiian Airlines, after a lifetime of growing up and using Aloha.

If you haven’t figured out by now, I’m one of those who blame go! as one of the biggest reasons Aloha shut down (soaring jet fuel prices and alleged mis-management did not help), but my lay opinion was go!’s perceived predatory pricing as the biggest culprit. Full disclosure:  I have never flown on go! and never plan to! Although with work trying to save money, this may not be possible much longer.  Also, an uncle, a cousin, and a good friend’s parent worked for Aloha, and were personally affected by the shutdown.

As is typical, I tried to funnel my energy into doing something productive yesterday to cope.  I was busy with the mayoral debates (more on that in a future post), so I had time to let this anger fester during the whole day. So what did I do? What any free-speech-loving citizen would: took to my blog, of course! Except I didn’t have one! It’s a good thing I went to PodCamp Hawaii this past weekend (more on that later, too). So late last night I set up this blog and here I am.

I also wanted to find a way to keep Aloha Airlines’ name alive, not just in people’s hearts and minds, but some small physical or electronic reminder.  Unfortunately, their domain, www.alohaairlines.com, is registered already (to Aloha Air Cargo, which took over their cargo operations).  I looked at other similar names, but ultimately decided to set-up a free WordPress blog and may switch it later if I can find a good domain. For now, I’ll settle for this with my Aloha masthead.

So to @GoAirlines on Twitter, thank you so much for motivating me! I resisted starting my blog at PodCamp because I couldn’t answer the question, “What would I blog about?”  Nothing like strong emotion to get one motivated! I’m not sure what I’ll be writing about nor how often, but I assure you that when inspiration strikes, I’ll be blogging.

For anyone else who may have been spammed by @GoAirlines, one of my friends wants to have us all block them at the same time on Twitter.  I’ll post details if he gets them to me in time.

And remember folks…as the t-shirt says, “There’s no ALOHA in the HAWAIIAN skies – GO! figure.”  Please use Hawaiian, Island Air, Mokulele, or even the Superferry for your inter-island travel needs.

Mahalo!

Tagged as: Aloha Airlines, Hawaii, Hawaiian Airlines, PodCamp, Twitter