HEROS in paradise

In Hawaii, they like to talk about the Aloha spirit of welcoming newcomers. Aloha however also seems to mean 'goodbye' or 'go home' or 'go back where you came from', at least as far as airlines are concerned, because that's the kind of welcome that Jonathan Ornstein has found since he went to the islands earlier this year to set up a new lower fare interloper he dubbed go!

Go! uses Canadair RJ 50-seaters, many of them veterans of the Independence Air debacle, in a bid to undercut interisland service from the two big established carriers, Aloha and Hawaiian, and a smaller turboprop operator, Island Air; since Ornstein began go! with fares that undercut the rivals, a really hostile battle of words and press releases has been accompanied by what else - lawsuits. And nasty actions. Aloha airlines has even gone so far as to say it would no longer accept tickets from go! when flights were cancelled or delayed, and that it would no longer carry go! passenger bags when go! "is unable to carry a passenger's bags on their small aircraft".

Aloha is not alone in its anger; the other major carrier, the larger Hawaiian Airlines, sued Mesa, claiming that Mesa, which put itself forward as a potential buyer when Hawaiian was in bankruptcy, used its time kicking the tires and looking at books to garner secrets about Hawaiian's business that it later used to launch the new rival. The case is in court, where a judge says Hawaiian may have a case, but it put off ruling. Aloha has also filed similar charges in a separate case.

But this battle, as befits a 21st Century dispute, also counts the web as a battlefield, with a grassroots (webroots?) group calling itself HERO or H.E.R.O. for 'Hawaii's airline Employees Repelling Ornstein'.

Filled with negative reports on Mesa that would make proud Karl Rove or any political operative in 'opposition research', the site draws plenty of visitors, including it would seem Ornstein's camp. Shortly after the Hero site went active, go! launched a fare sale touting 'Hero' fares of $19 each way, which wouldn't cover roasting the in-flight peanuts much less salting them. The leading paper in the islands, Honolulu's Star-Bulletin, soon ran an online poll asking, "Will the entrance of Mesa Air Group's go! airline in the Hawaii market be good in the long run?" Included beneath the poll was the comment, "Multiple votes will be deleted. Note: Vote tallies may change during the week, as attempts to manipulate the voting are discovered and deleted." So when the poll ended, 'yes' votes outnumbered 'no' votes by 2 to 1.

Our friend Holly Hegeman of planebusiness.com reports that apparently the paper was alerted at some point to a corporate e-mail from Mesa management asking all of their employees to participate in the poll. After the newspaper purged all the duplicate and other suspicious responses, the poll swung over to a resounding 'No' result.