PHOTO ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF FRANCO MANCASSOLA Franco Mancassola, an Italy native who has started two airlines that ultimately were unsuccessful, says he is mulling an attempt at starting a new carrier flying between the West Coast and Hawaii. The airline, as shown in the above artist's rendering, would be called Blue Hawaii. Mancassola does not yet have have any planes.

Blue Hawaii skies?

An Italian businessman wants to start
another airline to serve the isles

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By Russ Lynch
rlynch@starbulletin.com

Franco Mancassola, the man who brought Discovery Airways into interisland competition in 1989, wants to come back to Hawaii, this time with jets flying from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Honolulu.

Mancassola has a name for the new airline, Blue Hawaii, and plans to run two flights a day from Los Angeles and two from San Francisco and maybe, later, some service from Seattle. He has in mind the Boeing 767-300ER, the same aircraft that Hawaiian Airlines is now using in its mainland-Hawaii service.

In time, he said, he would use smaller aircraft to do interisland runs.

In a telephone interview, Mancassola said from his home in Rome, Italy, that he hated hearing about the merger plans of Hawaiian Airlines and Aloha Airlines and decided to create a new airline that would "bring back competition and act as a safety valve against a monopoly," or at best a duopoly, if the two airlines do continue to compete interisland and on the long hauls.

His startup target for the mainland-Hawaii flights is late this year, he said.

Mancassola acknowledged that he has no aircraft, still needs to wrap up financing and has yet to apply for the regulatory approvals he would need.

But he said he has successfully started an airline since leaving Hawaii. That experience, along with getting Discovery started and an earlier marketing post at Mid-Pacific Airlines -- which flew in interisland competition for seven years before failing -- was enough to convince him that he can do it.

Using Discovery's "D" logo uniforms and other "D" related merchandise that belonged to him, Mancassola in 1995 started an airline that started with a "D."

It was called Debonair and ran from Luton, a regional airport outside London, to several European destinations. Debonair went public in 1997 but went broke in 1999 and was sold in parts to other airlines.

Mancassola still calls it a success.

"I have interested parties willing to invest in a project like Blue Hawaii," Mancassola said.

He said he is aware that other airlines offering service only from the West Coast have died in the past, in part because they had no feed to the West Coast from inland airports. But Mancassola said he has been talking to major carriers and believes that will not be a problem.

There was a lot of opposition to Discovery Airways from Hawaiian and Aloha and from politicians and others who could only see a third airline hurting the others, he said. In the end, Discovery was grounded only because its financial backer, Philip Ho, was judged to be a foreigner even though he had recently gained U.S. citizenship.

Mancassola said the rules were later changed and if the same structure existed today it would be allowed.