Hawaii’s World
IF there's a lingering belief that Hawaii is the Crossroads of the Pacific for anything but culture, developments at San Francisco Airport should stamp it out. S.F.’s new nonstop flights
let tourists bypass islesYes, we are an unmatched ethnic intersection where diverse peoples live in relative harmony.
But doings at San Francisco International, tabbed SFO in airline lingo, underline that our future is just as a niche in the mid-Pacific -- not a hub. SFO next May will open a $3.3 billion international terminal with berths for 24 wide-bodied jets instead of the present eight.
It will capitalize on the ability of today's mammoth planes to carry hundreds of passengers up to 10,000 miles on one tank of fuel. They can easily bypass Hawaii en route to Asia and the South Pacific.
After aggressive wooing by San Francisco authorities, All Nippon, the world's largest non-American carrier, has agreed to start daily service to Tokyo, bringing SFO the advantage of its great feeder network in Asia.
Northwest and Japan Air already fly the route daily. Cathay Pacific has just been wooed for Hong Kong nonstops. Alitalia, also wooed, brought actress Sophia Loren to the region to publicize its new daily nonstop to Milan.
British Air has two daily nonstops to London.
United, SFO's biggest carrier with about half of the airport's travelers and arms out in many directions, has just added the first U.S. nonstop service to Shanghai, five days a week.
SFO sales pitches relate to its proximity to Silicon Valley, the unofficial high-tech capital of the world, and the charms of visiting in San Francisco and the nearby wine country of Napa Valley.
The airport handled 40 million passengers last year, seven million of them international, according to the San Francisco Examiner, my source for these numbers. San Francisco sees international travelers as a high-spending breed of cats and is going after them aggressively now that its new terminal is nearly ready.
The look of the new terminal has been an undecipherable mass of wooden framing for the past couple of years. But now the frames are coming down and travelers at SFO can begin to glimpse a modern, glassy, orderly addition to an already-big terminal.
STILL under construction is a double loop of track for AirTrain. By the end of 2001, it will provide connections every three minutes, 24 hours a day, between nine airport stops. It will link with BART, the monorail service for the entire Bay Area and also with a new rental car center.
When a new airport hotel is completed, it will become a 10th stop in a loop that takes 15 minutes for a complete circle. The cars will be electric-powered, quiet and able to move 3,400 passengers an hour.
Almost every major airport in America now has at least a piece of the business of flying passengers nonstop for up to 12 hours and distances up to 10,000 miles. Los Angeles remains the main link to the South Pacific.
Even Hawaii can get in the act, but as a niche -- not a hub. Europe is within our reach over the pole. So are most Asian destinations, the South Pacific and North and South America.
But few of our passengers will be transiting. Mostly they will come here as a final destination if they come at all -- and only via airlines for which we and they can create enough demand.
The Hawaii Tourism Authority must operate in this new, tougher context.
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.