America West Airlines is about half-way through the 18 month FAA approval process. The FAA is evaluation 13 of America West's 757's to insure that they can make the over-ocean journey.
America West spokesman Phil Gee says: "We hope that once we get our aircraft certified, we can look to see if flying to Hawaii is a viable option." He also said that America West had already began training flight attendants and crew members for the flights.
ATA to add Hawaii service
ATA Airlines, which flies to Hawaii from Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, has decided to undertake a significant ramp-up of service to Hawaii, this time from Phoenix.
The move could bring more discount fliers to Hawaii but offers a competitive challenge to Hawaiian Airlines, which currently is the only airline with daily service from Phoenix to Hawaii.
ATA, which entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy late last year, recently entered into a strategic alliance with Southwest Airlines, the nation's largest discount carrier. Southwest doesn't have FAA authorization to fly to Hawaii, so ATA's service to the islands is attractive to Southwest. Just days ago the chief financial officer of Southwest was named CEO of ATA.
ATA's vice president of planning, who is aptly named Stan Hula, says ATA will launch Phoenix flights to Hawaii in April and more in June, until it, too, is flying here daily. It will serve both Honolulu and Kahului from Phoenix.
That isn't all. By June the airline says it will also have four flights a week to Kauai, three of them from Los Angeles and the fourth from San Francisco. Two more flights from Los Angeles will go to Kona. ATA already has daily flights from Los Angeles to Maui which actually start in Indianapolis, the carrier's headquarters hub.
Just as Southwest intends to use ATA to get people to Hawaii, its closest discount competitor America West already interchanges passengers with Hawaiian Airlines at both of its hubs, Phoenix and Las Vegas.
Northwest hikes fares
Northwest Airlines confirmed Thursday it is hiking fares $5 each way for flights of less than 1,000 miles and $10 each way for longer runs.
The increases, which a company spokesman said were spurred by the continued high cost of jet fuel, could trigger similar increases by others.
Fare hikes like this are often posted late in the week like this, and then quietly rescinded the following week if competitors didn't match it and bookings fell.
What is different about this one is which airline is starting it. Northwest has been the most common holdout when other big five carriers attempt to raise fares.
With the most extensive Japan service of any U.S. airline and a lot of routes across the northern United States that have comparatively little direct competition from discount carriers, Northwest has more routes than other legacy carriers on which it faces little competitive pressure. With strong revenues from those routes, it can better afford to compete with discount airlines on other routes.
But in the past year the situation has changed. Soaring jet fuel -- the price of U.S. crude oil closed at $51.39 a barrel Thursday in New York -- has hurt discount carriers almost as much as legacy airlines, and most of them are now also operating in the red, while fares have remained among the lowest in decades in real dollar terms.
Northwest also announced Thursday the launch of an extensive cargo code sharing alliance with Korean Airlines, the busiest air freight carrier in the Pacific.
