Tricks to avoid those pesky airline fees

Where there’s a will, there’s a weigh. In the context of airline baggage fees, this rewrite of the old axiom means that efforts to get around baggage fees by overstuffing the bags could fail the moment the luggage hits the scale at the airport. Curse those overweight fees!

As much as we all like to see Hawaiian Airlines doing well — it’s reportedly rocketing toward a banner year in collections of this fee, topping $32.6 million so far — this is really starting to pinch the travelers where it hurts: right in the travel budget.

So where to turn? The Web, of course. Simply entering the search terms "how to avoid baggage fees" will yield loads of lists of tips. Squeeze stuff into vacuum bags. Get one of those vests with a million pockets.

There are also folks gaming the system by bringing an overstuffed "carry-on" to the gate and checking it there — this can evade the fee. Seems like cheating to us.

Putting down power outages in Honolulu

Often, when the Hawaiian Electric Co. is in the news, it’s not good news.

Headaches over power outages. Criticism over rate hikes.

So here’s a bright spot: Newly installed equipment and "smart controller" technology in urban and East Honolulu that’ll allow HECO to more quickly detect outages and restore power. Troubleshooting during outages will speed up, HECO says, and restoration times in some situations would be cut from hours to minutes.

Combined with an earlier phase, the just-finished upgrades in the university area, Kaimuki and Kahala promise to improve service reliability for half of HECO’s Oahu customers. Power to the people, for sure.