No, don’t worry Hawaiian and Aloha fans. There’s no need to have a heart attack. go! is not expanding beyond its interisland network with $49 fares to the mainland. Besides, could you imagine that ride in a CRJ? Yikes.

They’re actually just doing a one time trip to the mainland to bring 15,000 ti leaves to University of Hawai’i fans traveling to see their team play in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. The ti leaf is thought to ward off evil spirits in Hawaiian culture. Something tells me that some of these fans would like to ward off go! from flying within the islands any longer.

But if these fans are really smart, they’ll get together and make the world’s largest batch of ‘okolehao. That stuff is moonshine that’s made from the ti leaf, and I have to imagine it’ll get you nice and drunk. Just picture 15,000 drunk Polynesians wandering the French Quarter after a victory on Tuesday night. Heck, I’d fly a CRJ all the way from LA to see that.

It would figure that an extremely busy week for me would also be a busy news week in the airline world. Though I’ve tried to avoid these short summaries lately, there’s just too much going on for me to do it any other way today. Unfortunately, most of these stories involve angry passengers, long delays, wastes of money, and other things that just make you want to avoid traveling. *sigh*

Delta Airlines, Hypocrite of the Week – PlaneBuzz notes that Delta really had some balls this week by putting out two conflicting press releases on the same day. The first whined about all the air traffic control delays and called for reform. Right afterwards, they announced they were adding MORE flights out of JFK. I’m planning on doing a more in-depth piece on JFK next week. The airport is melting down in the midst of Delta’s insane flight buildup. On beautifully clear days, you’re still looking at long delays. It’s so bad, I would recommend avoiding the airport, yet Delta thinks there’s room for more. Nice work.

Anger Over Apple Juice – As bad as the delays are getting, passengers still need to find a way to control their anger. This flight actually was in the air when someone freaked out about not getting a drink quickly enough and they diverted. As far as I’m concerned, the airline should be charging that guy for the extra costs involved. Now some reports say it was a little kid which makes me wonder if it was Pearl, from Will Ferrell’s epic sketch, The Landlord, embedded below. (Click here if you can’t see it.)

Aloha Means Hello AND Goodbye – One place where we aren’t seeing any delays right now is in Hawai’i, but there are other problems there. The addition of go! to the state’s skies continues to cause huge problems for everyone. Really, nobody is making money out there right now, and nobody is doing worse than Aloha. In its first quarter, the airline lost just over $24m on revenue of only $88m. This is an airline that just came OUT of bankruptcy. This explains why they’ve recently tied up with United. They make United’s financials look good.

NIMBYs First, Safety Second – In yet another step forward for people who moved into the area long after the airport was there, a bill was introduced in Congress to prohibit LAX from separating its two runways on the north side. What do I think? Boooooooo!!!! This is a case where trying to improve the safety of the airport (as they’ve done on the south runways already) is considered to be unimportant compared to the needs of a handful of residents who moved there long after the airport existed. That’s what you get when you move in near an airport. Deal with it.

Gimme My Balls Back – Apparently, eBay gave away some stress balls during its conference, but since the balls contained liquid they weren’t allowed to go through security. I have two thoughts on this. 1) Our security policy is dumb and 2) eBay is dumb for not thinking about that before handing them out. Oh well.

Rockford Airport Gets the Waste of Money Award – As a taxpayer, I’m pissed. Rockford Airport has been subsidizing United Airlines flights to Denver from the city. The agreement is that every flight is guaranteed $7,000. If it makes less, the airport will make up the difference. So far this year, they’ve spent $2.3m on it! The subsidies are apparently so successful that they’re going to extend them. What?!? How is that successful? Yeah, the flights are full, but they’re clearly not making money if you have to drop that much cash. Now if these were local funds, I wouldn’t care, but $1m of that is coming from the feds and that comes out of all our pockets. And this for an airport that’s only 70 miles away from Chicago/O’Hare. These subsidies can’t go on forever. Just give up now and let airlines serve the airport that can make it work on their own (like Allegiant, which serves three cities from Rockford and gets no subsidies). Just think what kind of air traffic control system we could build if the feds stopped funding flights like these.

Last week, both Singapore and Aloha came out with some cool looking new planes. First up, let’s take a look at Singapore’s first A380 to come out of the paint shop. I definitely don’t think they got its best side. That cro-magnon looking forehead is definitely exaggerated even further with all that white space. (Taken from Singapore website. Photo credit: Airbus – C. Brinkmann)

Next up we have Aloha’s Wyland-painted 737. Yup, they say it was hand-painted by Wyland, but I don’t know if you can actually hand paint and airplane without affecting drag. Anyway, you might recognize the name – he’s famous for painting huge marine life murals primarily in the US but also all over the world. I found this one on the HNL RareBirds blog, a great place for airplane porn in the Hawaiian Islands.

The first casualty in the battle for Hawai’i (see this post) has arrived. No, it’s not an airline going away (yet), but it does involve nice looking airplanes.

According to an article in ATW, go’s $19 one way fares have made Island Air change their minds about this whole expansion thing. The one Q400 they already received will be returned and the other two will not be taken up.

It sounds to me like they’re just using go’s fares as an excuse. They had originally acquired these larger aircraft to compete head to head with Aloha and Hawaiian on routes like Kahului (Maui) to Honolulu. They had fewer flights than the big guys and they were flying props. Even though I love flying on props in the islands, most people gravitate toward jets.

Either way, it’s the end of their grand experiment. My guess is that they will shrink back to their roots, connecting smaller island airports like Kapalua (Maui) to the bigger cities.