ATA Airlines shuts down

From the New York Times, Reuters, Hon­olulu Adver­tiser and the Hon­olulu Star-Bulletin: ATA Air­lines has shut down as of 2200 HT yes­ter­day, 2 April 2008.

ATA man­age­ment decided to file for Chap­ter 11 bank­ruptcy and close oper­a­tions after the com­pany lost a key mil­i­tary char­ter con­tract. ATA has replaced its web site with an announce­ment of the shutdown.

ATA oper­ated flights between Hon­olulu and three West Coast cities, and sev­eral routes on the main­land. I flew ATA once in 2002, and the plane was full of tourists on Pleas­ant Hol­i­days pack­ages.

Plan ahead

The Adver­tiser noted that ATA’s last flight out of Hon­olulu left at 0010 HT today, after the shut­down was announced. I doubt ATA gave local hotels and air­lines much advance notice. This Star-Bulletin arti­cle describes how local exec­u­tives and state offi­cials started prepar­ing last week as rumors of Aloha’s clo­sure moved through the coconut wireless.

“It was just a mat­ter of wait­ing to push the but­ton on the press release, which would trig­ger the Web site announce­ment, and the hotel asso­ci­a­tion would send out up to 4,000 notices to mem­bers,” [Rex John­son, Hawaii Tourism Author­ity pres­i­dent] said.

No announce­ment from Aloha came Saturday.

“Finally, on Sun­day at 11, we got the release. [Mur­ray Tow­ill, pres­i­dent of the Hawaii Hotel and Lodg­ing Asso­ci­a­tion] pressed his but­ton, [Mark Dunker­ley, pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive offi­cer of Hawai­ian Air­lines] put out a release say­ing there would be 6,000 extra seats and we started to tell peo­ple that nobody needed to worry because Hawaii tourism would be oper­at­ing normally.”

Ian Lind has a few com­ments at the top of his blog post this morning.

From the Star-Bulletin’s article:

On Mon­day, Aloha pres­i­dent and Chief Exec­u­tive David Ban­miller prophet­i­cally pre­dicted that there would be more fall­out in the avi­a­tion industry.

“You haven’t seen the end yet,” he said. “We hap­pen to be at the begin­ning. Other things are going to hap­pen in this busi­ness because this envi­ron­ment of fuel can­not be sustained.”

Ban­miller had cited an inter­is­land air­fare war trig­gered by Mesa Air Group’s go! and record fuel prices as the pri­mary rea­sons for Aloha’s shutdown.

“On a fed­eral level, you show me where the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, where the White House, where the admin­is­tra­tion, where the hill has been dur­ing this cri­sis in the avi­a­tion indus­try,” he said.

If any­one is won­der­ing about the trickle down effect from the Nor­we­gian Cruise Lines’ deci­sion to move 2 of its 3 Honolulu-based cruise ships out of the state, the Star-Bulletin also reported this morn­ing that the Kona Hard Rock Cafe will close on 21 July 2008. The restau­rant lost its lease, but I expect more announce­ments like this, espe­cially around Waikiki and Hilo.

Related posts

• 3 April 2008: Pro­test­ers and text messages
• 2 April 2008: Aloha cargo sale and neigh­bor island mail ser­vice in jeopardy
• 30 March 2008: Aloha Air­lines shuts down

Tagged as: airline, airlines, Aloha, bankrupt, contingency, Hawaii, Honolulu, management, planning, reliability, USA