Mesa Air Group Inc., which selected go! as the name of its startup Hawaii airline, tried later to change it to Aloha Airlines and then ended up with the cumbersome go!Mokulele, is going back to its roots.
Jonathan Ornstein, chairman and CEO of Mesa, said he is phasing out the name go!Mokulele from the company’s Hawaii fleet of five 50-seat CRJ-200s and reverting to go! The change comes less than a year after Mesa sold its four nine-seat Cessna Caravans to Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Transpac Aviation Inc., which operates the Caravans under the name Mokulele Airlines.
Ornstein, who was at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel Tuesday night for a go! party commemorating the interisland carrier’s sixth anniversary, said there is no timetable set to complete the changeover. Only one of the go! aircraft has been repainted so far with just the go! moniker, and the signage and ticket counter at Honolulu Airport still say go!Mokulele.
"We don’t want to confuse passengers," Ornstein said about the reason for changing the name.
Ornstein said, however, that go! still has a code-sharing agreement with Mokulele that allows the two carriers to sell each other’s tickets.
"We didn’t want to do the name change abruptly and hurt them with recognition, but they’ve got their website up and are doing fine," Ornstein said.
In fact, Mokulele CEO Ron Hansen said the airline is expanding and will be taking delivery of a fifth Caravan in Kona on Friday. Last month, Mokulele announced it would return service between Honolulu and Kapalua Airport in West Maui for the first time in three years beginning July 1. Mokulele primarily serves Hawaii’s smaller markets.
Ornstein said Hansen has brought renewed focus to the smaller Mokulele fleet that Mesa acquired in October 2009 in a joint venture from Indianapolis-based Republic Airways, the majority investor of Mokulele. Go! changed its name at that time to go!Mokulele.
Before that venture, go! tried to acquire the licensing rights to rebrand itself as Aloha Airlines after Aloha’s shutdown on March 31, 2008. But federal Bankruptcy Judge Lloyd King rejected the licensing portion of an agreement that go!’s parent Mesa had reached with Yucaipa Cos., the former majority investor in Aloha. After impassioned pleas from former Aloha employees, King said the record showed that Mesa entered the interisland market with the intention of forcing Aloha out of business by misusing confidential information it obtained as a potential investor during the Hawaiian Airlines and Aloha Airlines bankruptcies. He also noted that Aloha had sued Mesa for improper predatory pricing.
Hansen, meanwhile, said two of the Caravans he acquired from Mesa last year were painted with the name Mokulele Airlines and two with the name Mokulele Express. He said Wednesday that he has made arrangement to have those two Mokulele Express Caravans renamed Mokulele Airlines in the next few months. He agreed that having both go!Mokulele and Mokulele Airlines sharing the same name is confusing.
"Absolutely," he said. "Every day we have people who want to go on go! and bought tickets on a go! flight from Kona to Honolulu and show up at our ticket counter," Hansen said. "We don’t serve that market (nonstop). Well, we do but with two stops. So it’s very confusing to the passengers."
Go!, which began service in Hawaii on June 9, 2006, has been benefiting from the recent drop in jet fuel prices, Ornstein said. He said go! uses 400,000 gallons a month and that every cent the price of fuel goes down represents a savings of $4,000 a month, or approximately $50,000 a year. Ornstein said in the past couple of weeks that the price of fuel has dropped to $3.07 a gallon from $3.75.
"If fuel prices stay at these levels, we have a really good shot of sustained profitability," said Ornstein, who acknowledged that go! has been fluctuating between being in the red and the black on a monthly basis.
