Go!’s traffic hit record after Aloha shutdown

Mesa Air Group's interisland airline go! said yesterday its passenger numbers climbed 55.3 percent in April to a record 86,417 in the wake of Aloha Airlines' closure.

Go!, which added three 50-seat CRJ-200s to its fleet last month, saw its load factor, or percentage of seats filled, increase to 68.51 percent from 62.75 percent a year ago despite the additional aircraft.

Available seat miles, or one seat transported one mile, rose more than 43 percent to 18.22 million from 12.7 million because of the extra planes. Go! now operates about 88 flights per day, an increase of about 50 percent from before Aloha's March 31 shutdown.

Go! flies up to 12 round trips per day between Honolulu and Kahului, Maui, and Lihue, Kauai, and up to 10 round trips per day between Honolulu and Hilo and Kona on the Big Island.

Revenue passenger miles, or one paying passenger transported one mile, jumped 56 percent to 12.48 million from 8 million a year ago.

Hawaiian Airlines, which reported its April numbers earlier this month, carried a record 718,767 passengers systemwide in April, an increase of 25.5 percent over April 2007 when it transported 572,613 people. Hawaiian's load factor during the month was 88 percent compared with 87.8 percent a year earlier.

Hawaiian doesn't separate its interisland passenger traffic from its other routes, but the airline has attributed the bulk of the increase to interisland traffic.