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Hawaiian Cargo, Others Busy After Aloha Closes

Customers Find Long Lines

POSTED: 2:29 pm HST April 29, 2008
UPDATED: 2:57 pm HST April 29, 2008

Hawaiian Airlines Cargo was much busier than normal on Tuesday because of the shutdown of Aloha Cargo the day before.

Trucks were moving in out of the loading area all day long.

Forklifts seemed to be in constant motion as customers waited patiently in lines that were much longer than normal.

Just ask David Sumida of Sumida Farms.

"It about maybe triple the business today. Normally I can come here and just drop off everything smooth but it's really hectic today. It's really busy," he said.

Dan McGivern arrived three hours earlier than he usually does.

"I thought there might be lines and things because there are a lot more people here than normal," McGivern said.

Both Sumida and McGivern are longtime Hawaiian customers.

Pural Water Specialty used Aloha Cargo for years, but recently opened an account at Hawaiian.

"Since the whole thing with Aloha Airlines started the company just thought it would be more comfortable if we ship equipment through Hawaiian," said Lawrence Padilla of Pural Water Specialty.

Padilla said it was a good call considering what Hawaiian Cargo employees told him in the morning.

"If you have an account you can make your shipment. If you don't then you have to wait. I was one of the lucky ones that got account," Padilla said.

With Aloha Cargo's demise, a lot more businesses will be scrambling to get an account.

Hawaiian Airlines reported it normally handles 8 to 10 percent of the air cargo in the state and that has now doubled.

Hawaiian officials said it does not plan to become fully involved in the cargo business.

"We don't have plans to dedicated cargo business at the moment right now we are focused really on making sure we've got all the passengers side of the business taken care of so we are not going to fill void on cargo side as we have on the passenger side so far," Hawaiian Air spokesman Keoni Wagner said.

With more passengers comes more baggage and less space for additional cargo.

Many smaller airfreight companies also saw their business pick up immediately.

Alpine Air said it has been flooded with calls and plans to add about five more flights a day immediately.

Currently Alpine has 10 daily flights to the neighbor islands. Hawaii station manager David Dart said they would like to add even more if they could.

"We don't have an over abundance of planes here. We have operations in other states we had the right balance for what we were doing. So we can only put so much more to work but we're going to put all our capacity we possibly can," Dart said.

Currently, 90 percent of Alpine's business is delivering mail.

Dart said the added flights are to carry other goods like auto parts, T-shirts and newsprint.

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