Hawaiian Airlines Has a Busy Week
Hawaiian Airlines has been in the news a lot this week, some good and some bad.
First of all they’ve entered into a codeshare agreement with United Airlines. This will allow passengers flying to Hawaii on United to connect seamlessly with Hawaiian Airlines interisland flights. Hawaiian passengers will also be able to earn and redeem United Mileage Pluse miles on Hawaiian flights. This agreement replaces the one United had with the now defunct Aloha Airlines.
From personal experience we suggest earning United miles for any of these flights. Under the previous agreement with Aloha we were converting our United Milage Plus miles to Aloha frequent flyer miles and lost them all when Aloha went under.
Secondly, Hawaiian Airlines April passenger traffic was up over 25%, it’s first full month of operation since the shutdowns of Aloha and ATA. Predictably their stock went down.
Now for the bad news, two Hawaiian Airlines flights had in-flight emergencies that forced them to turn around. On May 16th flight 29 from Portland to Oahu returned to Portland after a wing panel came loose in flight. The crew noticed the problem soon after take off and returned at Portland.
The day before a Portland bound Hawaiian Airlines 767 had to shut down an engine almost 2 hours into the flight and return to the islands. The flight was re-routed to Maui where it landed safely.
Photo credit: Boeing