Aloha lost
$6.8 million
in quarter

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By Russ Lynch
rlynch@starbulletin.com

Aloha Airlines lost $6.8 million in the second quarter, bringing its losses for the first half of this year to $13.9 million, according to the company's filings at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The second-quarter loss was more than 30 times the loss of $205,618 that Aloha reported for the second quarter of 2001. Operating revenues of $78.8 million in the latest quarter were down 9.1 percent from $82.1 million in the year-earlier quarter, but operating expenses were $88.7 million, up 7.9 percent from a year-earlier $82.2 million. The result was a loss of $9.9 million from operations in the second quarter of this year, compared to an operating loss of $162,419 in the 2001 quarter.

"These results reflect the continuing effect of 9/11 on the interisland market," said Stu Glauberman, an Aloha spokesman.

He said there were also some startup costs from launching new services to Burbank, Calif.; Vancouver, B.C.; and Phoenix, Ariz. But most of the downturn came from the lingering effects on travel, particularly from Japan, after the hijacking disasters of Sept. 11, Glauberman said.

In the first quarter of this year, Aloha lost $7.1 million on revenues of $75.2 million.

As a privately owned company, Aloha does not issue public financial statements but has to file them in Washington. The results in those filings are from the operations of Aloha Airlines only and do not include figures from its smaller sister carrier, Island Air.

Aloha Airlines has received $8.5 million in federal grants under the national airline recovery program that followed Sept. 11 but none of that money came in 2002. Aloha has applied for $45 million loan under a federal program and joined with competitor Hawaiian Airlines in seeking an antitrust exemption so the two can work together to reduce excess interisland capacity. Both matters are pending.

Hawaiian lost $31.1 million in the latest quarter, on top of a loss of $18.6 million in the first quarter, for a total of almost $50 million in red ink so far this year.

Hawaiian received federal emergency grants totaling $24.9 million last year.