John W. Adams, who became chairman of Hawaiian's board on Jan. 30, said that a business associate asked him about eight months ago to sit in on a meeting with an airline executive who was going to make a pitch for capital.
"I was, to say the least, skeptical," Adams, 52, said at Thursday's annual shareholders' meeting at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.
Airlines are known to be capital-intensive money losers that are often run by flamboyant executives in a "macho, king-of-the-hill fashion," he said in his first public comments on the purchase.
But Adams said he went away from that first meeting impressed with the no-frills presentation made by Hawaiian's president and chief executive, Bruce R. Nobles.
Still skeptical even as they made a tentative agreement, Adams and his associates insisted on Hawaiian meeting a number of conditions that he said had a good chance of derailing the deal.
They included financial concessions by American Airlines, owner of Hawaiian's DC-10 airplanes, and new union contracts containing labor concessions. Hawaiian came through with both. The fact the airline is beginning to show profits shows the investment was the right thing to do, Adams said.
After Thursday's shareholders' meeting, Adams said that he and his associates had been studying airlines for a year or 18 months before the investment in Hawaiian, but they were looking at the big-name carriers undergoing reorganizations.
Adams is president of Smith Management Co., the New York investment firm that put together Airline Investors Partnership, which bought control of Hawaiian.
He and five other AIP nominees were re-elected to the board Thursday.
Under the deal in which it bought 18.2 million new Hawaiian shares at the end of January, AIP won the right to six of the 11 board seats. The other AIP representatives are Richard F. Conway, 42; Robert G. Coo, 54; William Boyce Lum, 57; Richard K. Matros, 42; and Edward Z. Safady, 38.
Also re-elected to the board were three union representatives: state Sen. Carol A. Fukunaga, 48, nominated by the Association of Flight Attendants; Reno F. Morella, 47, a DC-10 captain with the Air Line Pilots Association; and Samson Poomaihealani, 54, from the International Association of Machinists. Also re-elected were Todd G. Cole, 75, a retired financial executive who later held top posts at Frontier Airlines and Eastern Airlines; and Nobles, 49, Hawaiian's top executive since 1993.