Hawaiian Airlines has finally finished tens of millions of dollars in fixes to “defects, deficiencies and incompletions” in a new maintenance and cargo hangar at the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Honolulu, and its chief executive officer, Mark Dunkerley, is calling for a state investigation to determine how the long-delayed project got so far off track.
Dunkerley said Hawaiian identified 3,688 “issues” on the hangar project after the airline took control of the unfinished facility in November. Airline officials said about two-thirds of the problems involved incomplete work that the contractor had marked as finished and the state had already paid for.
The remaining one-third of the problems involved “work that was done, and was done so substandard that we had to go back and rectify it,” Dunkerley said. “We certainly want to have the state investigate what went wrong, and people appropriately held to account.”
The problems on the job included site preparation that was so poorly done that concrete was cracking in a parking area before any traffic passed over it, and a vehicle ramp that was so steep that a heavily loaded truck would not be able to negotiate it, he said.
Other examples involved a 12-foot door with an obstruction built in that blocked it at the 9-foot level, lighting that was completely blocked by ducts, and walls that had to be ripped out because they were completed without the necessary electrical wiring inside, Dunkerley said.
“I think so many people didn’t do their job on this contract that it’s almost hard to point specific fingers,” Dunkerley said. “What we want is an audit so we can figure out why was this building so late, so far over budget and so poorly built, because at the end of the day, we’re paying the price for this, and we absolutely want and insist on knowing how we got into this awful predicament.”
Airport expenses are paid with fees charged to users, and Hawaiian now pays about 40 percent of the total fees collected by the airport, according to company officials.
Joshua Wisch, spokesman for the state attorney general, said Monday he was not familiar with Dunkerley’s comments, adding that “we generally do not discuss investigations, including to confirm whether one is even being conducted.”
The state signed a contract with DCK Pacific Construction LLC in 2010 for $73.43 million to build the hangar for Hawaiian, but work stalled on the project in 2015 after subcontractors abandoned the job.
The State Department of Transportation finally stopped all construction and locked down the job on Dec. 28, 2015, and the state discovered that 30 subcontractors were owed a total of $4.2 million. The state alleged it was paying general contractor DCK, but DCK was not paying the subcontractors.
What followed was more than a year of additional delays as the state and Hawaiian worked out an agreement to complete the 280,000-square-foot structure. Fixing the problems and completing the facility cost Hawaiian $34 million, and the work was finally completed last weekend.
The state is suing DCK, and transportation officials said in April they were also working with the State Procurement Office to bar DCK from working on future state projects.
The state Department of Transportation announced in July it was paying the suppliers and subcontractors that worked on the job under the terms of Act 19, which lawmakers passed this year to authorize the payments.
State Attorney General Doug Chin said in July that those payments “resolved more than 20 potential lawsuits all at once and … saved the state years of costly litigation. Plus, it was the right and fair thing to do.”
State Sen. Donna Mercado Kim (D, Kalihi Valley-Moanalua-Halawa) has questioned how the project could have gotten so far off course when the state hired a construction manager under a separate $4 million contract to oversee the details of the job.
State procurement records show consultant Wesley R. Segawa & Associates Inc. was hired by the Department of Transportation to manage the project.
The new Hawaiian Air hangar was originally expected to cost about $85 million, including change orders, but the final cost was about $120 million, Dunkerley said. Completion of the new hangar was critical because delays in the project effectively stalled hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of other airport improvements.
Dunkerley has described the maintenance and cargo facility as the “linchpin” in a series of airport improvements, but much of that work could not proceed until the hangar was finished.
With the new hangar completed, the state can demolish the old Hawaiian Air maintenance and cargo facilities, which will open access to the area where the commuter terminal for smaller airlines now sits. The commuter terminal is also to be demolished and replaced by a new mauka concourse next to the interisland terminal, which would increase the number of boarding gates.
Dunkerley said the money spent by the airline to complete the hangar will offset future rent payments by the airline. He said Hawaiian plans to move its employees and equipment into the hangar in the next month to six weeks.
Dunkerley said the new hangar will provide “vastly more” space for maintenance and other operations.
“At the moment we are running a business with over 50 aircraft, expensive, high-tech … aircraft, and we’re maintaining them in the open air,” he said. The new hangar will allow the airline to put four Boeing 717 aircraft and an Airbus A330 under cover at a time, he said.
