ENERGY SAVINGS
TIME CAPSULE
THE MAGIC MAN
LOCAL HOLIDAY TRADITIONS
DECEMBER 2017
Charter Players
A Day in the Life / Brandon Akiona
Today, it’s Oakland Station. Tomorrow, the Fresno State Bulldogs. This weekend, the NFL’s Oakland Raiders. OAK General Manager and Charter Coordinator Brandon Akiona’s passion involves delivering our trademark hospitality and seamless travel experience to all guests – including the players who wear XXXXX-Large jerseys.
“I’M A HAWAIIAN AIRLINES FAN, not a football fan,” said Brandon. “The biggest misperception is it’s glamorous to travel with NFL players. But the reason why we take on these additional responsibilities – everyone on the charter team already has a day job at Hawaiian – is to ensure that our company is delivering the best possible product. That’s always on the forefront of our minds.”
Photos from left: OAK Operations Manager Angela Carter (wearing safety vest) confirms paperwork with a team official; LAX and OAK Station GMs Lisa Halvorson and Brandon Akiona take a break from Charter duties; As part of the Charter team, Catering Coordinator Cameron Krainin meets Raiders players including Defensive End Fadol Brown.
The starters on Brandon’s team include a Catering Coordinator, onboard Ground Security Coordinator, Load Planner, Ramp Coordinator, Cleaners and other staff. Brandon also sends an advance scout for “away” games in places like Chicago or Denver, where Hawaiian Airlines doesn’t fly, to ensure that outside vendors are prepped and ready. Brandon was himself trained by San Francisco GM Tasha Eldridge, with support from Senior Director of North America Stations Randy Medeiros.
“The Raiders really like our sense of ‘ohana, our friendliness. They interact with the Pilots, Flight Attendants, Catering Coordinator. We know the players, staff, coaches, and security personnel on a first-name basis. When you have this relationship, you can anticipate their needs and go above and beyond.”
Since 2000, Hawaiian Airlines has been the exclusive air transportation provider for the Raiders, in partnership with DuFay Aviation Management. Many carriers would love to have this customer, noted Brandon. But the Raiders keep coming back because of the outstanding service. “Our charters are second to none. That unique Hawaiian Airlines hospitality – you’re there to welcome people into your home – is very much weaved into the Raiders operation. We add the little things to enhance their experience, on our own initiative.” For example, the A330 aircraft dedicated to these special charters bear the Raiders logo, and the entire cabin is tailored to this one client. The iconic pirate appears everywhere, from the menu to headrest covers, pillow slips, entranceway rugs, even personalized name cards so coaches know where to sit. The players enjoy three in-cabin buffet lines – pre-departure – with full meal service after take-off; Flight Attendants personally walk each meal from galley to player.
Brandon’s greatest moment of pride? When the entire Hawaiian Airlines ‘ohana tackles a problem – yes, they face many curveballs on the road, in unfamiliar cities, relying on an ever-changing list of vendors – something the Raiders never notice, contributing to a seamless and uncompromised experience. “The morning of the Cowboys game, I woke to a phone call: our passenger screening vendor was unable to reach the stadium due to Hurricane Harvey. LAX General Manager Lisa Halvorson was making calls from her station to find another vendor, Ops Managers and Ground Service Coordinators Jane Soakai and Ki‘i Kealalio-Puli made calls on the flight and in their hotel room. In October, days before a home game, the Raiders considered moving the game, due to the wildfires in Northern California.” “But that’s the exciting part: despite very different dynamics, the end result is the same. We all share this same pride in Hawaiian Airlines and same vision of our charter product. I like problem solving, because in the end we can say, ‘Look what we did!’” ■
Get to Know / Nicolas Antin
“The real trick is getting people to think they know what I’m going to do next,” says Nicolas Antin. “When the person smiles because they’ve ‘figured out’ how the card trick works, that’s when I’ve got them, they’re hooked. And it’s the best feeling!”
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ONG BEFORE he earned his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering and became our Manager of Fuel Budget & Aircraft Operations Performance, Nicolas was an accomplished magician – training since his youth in the seaport city of La Rochelle, France. “As a kid, I had a box of magic tricks, like everyone else. Then, I met a magician who lived in the same town, and the tradition for learning magic is one teacher, one student. It was like going to piano lessons, but instead, I was going to magic lessons.” With countless hours of practice up his sleeve, Nicolas has performed for Hawai‘i’s Governor, the French Consul, at weddings and corporate parties. His nimble fingers can manipulate almost any small object, from coins to balls to scarves. He can shuffle cards like a poker hustler and spread the deck like a fan. And he’s never resorted to shiners, cutters or
grease, relying entirely on sleight-of-hand – and jokes. “Magic is actually very technical, not dissimilar to aerospace and mechanical engineering. You are building up to a climax, stacking the pieces, assembling the parts for that big finale. I like to get very close to people and interact, because when they’re interrupted, or laughing – instead of paying close attention to what I’m doing –that’s the reaction I need to do my thing.” But simple distractions only work in the beginning. “After that first trick, they know I know what I’m doing, so I have to step it up, do a better trick, get into the more mental aspects. So, I make a prediction of something that seems very random, but is actually very planned.” For example, Nicolas might ask you to pick a card, or think of a card in your head – any card. Please say it out loud to
everyone at the table. He’ll then open the deck and spread it on the table with only one card facing up. Sure enough, it’s the same card you picked. How does he do it?! “I have a standard answer for that,” he says with a smile. “I ask them in return, ‘Can you keep a secret?’ and when they say ‘Yes!’ I reply, ‘So can I.’” ■ Above, Nicolas performs magic for chronically ill children and their families at Ronald McDonald House Hawai‘i. “When I lived in Paris, I spent New Year’s Eve at a cancer hospital, doing magic tricks. I thought I would see misery, but people are tough. Performing for them was great. I was happy to be there, and I will always remember it.”
OAK and PDX Get Their Own Maintenance and Supply Facilities
“We are growing operations in OAK and PDX, and moving away from contract maintenance. With our employees taking care of our aircraft, we expect better reliability and cleaner airplanes that better represent the Hawaiian Airlines brand.” — James Alvarado, Regional Maintenance Manager
“What is the best way to provide support for our new A321neo fleet?” was the question that sparked an ambitious project that has culminated in three new state-of-the-art line maintenance and supply facilities at our Oakland and Portland gateways.
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HE TRADITIONAL Hawaiian blessings, led by Kahu Richard Kamanu, were a moving experience for employees who had been working at PDX and OAK, as well as those beginning their HA careers at these new facilities. The ceremonies also signaled a new era for Hawaiian Airlines – where we are less dependent on outside vendors for scheduled and overnight maintenance, and on HNL and LAX Stations’ inventory of spare aircraft parts.
With OAK and PDX now acting as our West Coast maintenance and materials bases, Hawaiian Airlines is paving the way for better, safer and more reliable support for our new A321neo
aircraft as they begin Trans-Pacific service to the West Coast. “We’ve never had our own maintenance and supply base, so this is new territory and we’re very excited,” said PDX General Manager Kaleo Titcomb. “With vendors, their priorities are their own, but with our own employees, Hawaiian Airlines will always be the priority.” “The strategy for supporting the A321neo was shaped by experience with our existing fleet,” explained Managing Director of Strategic Procurement Rod Urbano. “First, our commercial schedule doesn’t allow for overnight line maintenance in Honolulu. Second, past lessons tell us that maintenance by outside vendors isn’t ideal at all stations. Third, by hiring our own employees to perform these duties, we’re building trust and faith with our workforce.” “Hawaiian Airlines has grown. We’ve developed the expertise and capability to expand our service and support beyond Hawai‘i. We recognize we have an engaged workforce, and our company will benefit from their strong pride of ownership as they provide the maintenance and material support for our
HAL / The Hawaiian Airlines Time Capsule
P
ICTURE THIS: The date is November 11, 2079. It’s the 150th anniversary of Hawaiian Airlines. Employees and journalists crowd around a mini LD3 cargo container tucked under a stairwell in the Charles I. Elliot Maintenance and Cargo Facility. Anticipation is in the air as the CEO cuts the lock. Gently, a treasure trove is removed from the time capsule. They find historical documents, publications, plaques and awards, posters, messages from current employees, photographs and a complete digital copy of our company archives. They are surprised and delighted as they discover the artifacts that we thought important to include.
Last month, we preserved our stories for future generations when we interred a time capsule at the new Charles I. Elliott Maintenance and Cargo Facility. It’s fun to imagine what that experience will be like for Hawaiian Airlines employees, 62 years from now. ■
new fleet of aircraft,” said Rod. “Opening these new facilities represents a natural progression for our company as we continue to develop our talent and increase our network.” A special mahalo to our Corporate Real Estate and IT teams, who established leases in both locations and were instrumental in helping to design, build and furnish these facilities. ■
“By expanding our supply operations here, we can better support the A321neo aircraft and maintenance operations in general. This is a long-term investment in our West Coast presence. We are ambassadors for Hawaiian Airlines and proud to show it.”
— Clinton Zane, North American Supply Operations Supervisor
Saving Fuel, Money and Our Islands
Did you have a ’piggy bank’ when you were a kid? Conserving fuel at an airline is very much like it. You save a few gallons in every phase of our operation, on every flight, every day – and before you know it, there’s a lot of unused fuel and unspent emissions in your “energy bank.” The effort to save each penny is big, but the reward is huge. With every gallon, our company saves money, and we help protect the earthly paradise we call home – Hawai‘i.
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AWAIIAN AIRLINES has more than 20 ongoing initiatives to reduce fuel. Most are mature and running steady-state. Big ones, like winglets, cost index/economic speed and light-weight baggage and cargo containers were implemented a while back. You could say we picked the low-hanging fruit. Yet, we can always improve. As technology evolves and the airline industry embraces it, new opportunities to leave a smaller carbon footprint come along, too. Take apps, for example. At an airline benchmark workshop, we heard about an app that could save us one percent of our en-route fuel burn. That may not sound like much, but for the Fuel Efficiency team, that’s huge. So, we said, “One percent? Okay, you have our attention.” A very small percentage of our fuel is burned on the ground. Due to the remote nature of our home base, most of our fuel is burned en-route – in fact, 98% of our wide-body fuel budget – so one percent is well worth chasing. The In-Flight Profile Optimizer app uses the flight plan, current and forecast wind speed, direction and temperature, along
with estimated arrival time, to compute an optimum altitude profile and economic speed for the entire flight and estimated fuel savings. Then, it continuously recalculates as aircraft and wind data are updated, presenting the best profile for the remainder of the flight and saving even more fuel. Altitude restrictions and airspace constraints are entered manually by the pilot, but everything else is automated. In-service testing of the Optimizer is on-going and the data collected thus far is quite promising. If the projected fuel savings are accurate, we will reduce our flight fuel by about 600 lbs. on a typical HNL-LAX one-way trip.
before adopting this app, our first step is to determine the applicability of this tool in our operating environment.
Company-wide, it will save us about 1.8 million gallons of jet fuel per year. We are very hopeful that this app will soon be incorporated into all Hawaiian Airlines long-range aircraft.
Saving fuel might be more complicated than picking up a nickel on the street. But it’s the same idea – one gallon at a time. The key is to keep looking for modest but achievable opportunities on every phase of every flight and, before you know it, you have a “green” piggy bank to contribute to the preservation of our gorgeous Island home! ■
Vertical and speed optimization on the flight deck are just baby steps toward a fully optimized flight. NASA’s Ames Research Center is developing a Traffic Aware Planner app to optimize altitude, speed and horizontal path. Wisdom dictates that we crawl before we walk, so
Our leadership envisioned the advent of these technologies and, equipped our aircraft with the best, most efficient architecture for communications and installation of the Electronic Flight Bag. Our aircraft will have a Cockpit Information Device(CID), a rugged tablet that receives real-time data from the aircraft’s computers and ground systems via satellite to provide additional information. A bit more complex than your personal phone, but similar in concept.
ART PARRA / Senior Manager,
Fuel Efficiency, Flight Operations
Kama‘āina Insights / Holiday Traditions
DURING THE HOLIDAY season in Hawai‘i, you’re apt to hear “Mele Kalikimaka” (Hawaiian for “Merry Christmas”) as often as “Silent Night” and “Joy to the World.” The late R. Alex Anderson, a World War II combat pilot and prominent businessman, wrote the lighthearted Christmas song in 1949. Although he had no formal music training, he is remembered as one of the Islands’ most prolific composers of hapa haole music (tunes about Hawai‘i that were written in English primarily between 1920 and 1959).
Reyn Spooner released its first limited-edition Hawaiian Christmas aloha shirt the following year. Design elements included the nēnē (Hawai‘i’s state bird) and green taro leaves interspersed with red and white anthuriums. The company has unveiled a different Christmas shirt every year since then. Along with oftseen icons of the season — reindeer, Santa Claus, holly, mistletoe and pine trees decorated with tinsel and ornaments, to name a few — patterns have incorporated emblems of Hawai‘i such as lei, pineapples, canoes, palm trees, surfers and hula dancers.
During an interview for the Hawaiian Music Hall of Fame in 1994, a year before he died at age 100, Anderson recalled how the idea for “Mele Kalikimaka” came about. It was 1949, right before Christmas. A secretary in his office asked, “Mr. Anderson, how come there’s no Hawaiian Christmas song? They take the hymns and put Hawaiian words to them, but there’s no original melody.”
Nēnē and tropical flowers are always part of the prints. And, since 1984, every design also cleverly works in the year it came out; finding it is not always easy.
Anderson recalled, “That spurred me right away. I thought, ‘What a good idea,’ and over a period of a few days [“Mele Kalikimaka”] came into my head. I put it down on paper and I’ve been singing it ever since.” Bing Crosby, Anderson’s good friend, recorded the song in 1950 with the Andrews Sisters. Jimmy Buffett and Bette Midler are among other popular vocalists who subsequently released versions of it, and it’s on the soundtracks of the movies National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989), L.A. Confidential (1997) and Catch Me If You Can (2002). Another fun Christmas tradition comes courtesy of Reyn Spooner. In 1982, Tim McCullough, son of the apparel company’s founder, Reyn McCullough, attended The Queen’s Medical Center Auxiliary’s annual fundraiser with his wife. They noticed many women were wearing beautiful holiday attire, but there was nothing notable about how the men were dressed. They decided to change that.
This year’s 35th-anniversary shirt features ukuleles, lehua blossom lei and postcards of Santa on an Island vacation—all set on a Hawaiian quilt background. ■
System Chief Pilot Peter Clark (left) and Global Sales Administrator Micah Leiato (right).
2018 Corporate Priorities
After enjoying two relatively good years, including a better-than-anticipated 2017, it’s important that we prepare for a year that we expect will bring headwinds in the form of increased competition and cost pressures. Our 2018 Corporate Priorities are designed to lay the groundwork to ensure that we continue to keep expenses under control while doing everything we can to keep our guests returning to us for their travel to and from Hawai‘i. These overall goals are contained in the following three themes: Improve Competitive Cost Structure / Driving down costs is necessary for winning head-to-head competitions. We need to be as efficient as possible with the resources we have and deliver the savings expected from prior investments. This would include improvements to vendor contracts and labor productivity, as well as a need to minimize costs and streamline processes, while driving efficiencies from investments and existing resources. Exceed Our Competitors’ Revenue Performance / We must outperform our competitors throughout our relationship with our guests to ensure that guests choose to give us more of their business – and are willing to pay a premium to do so. This involves offering products and services that meet the needs of
EDITOR
Mark Berthold Corporate Communications CONTRIBUTORS
Debbie Nakanelua-Richards Corporate Communications Art Parra Flight Operations
Brandon Akiona OAK Station
Daniel Roselle Corporate Communications
James Alvarado Regional Maintenance
Kaleo Titcomb PDX Station
Nicolas Antin Fuel Budget & Aircraft Operations Performance
Rod Urbano Strategic Procurement
Damian Balinowski Corporate Communications
Clinton Zane Supply Operations
all customer segments in the channels in which they choose to purchase as well as making our touchpoints, like kiosks, web and mobile, more accessible. Enhanced revenue-management tools to improve our competitive performance, and the ability to reap benefits from investments in prior years, will help us succeed. Build Foundation for the Future / To clear the path to longterm prosperity and growth, we need a strong infrastructure of tools, resources, and support organizations on which to build. To remain competitive, we must strengthen our organization so that every part adds value; build a robust technology platform that delivers agile and reusable solutions; and upgrade our airport facility to meet the needs of our business. ■
COVER
Jane Soakai, Sean Sanfilippo and Brandon Akiona after another successful flight with the NFL’s Oakland Raiders.
is written to inform, inspire and entertain the employees of Hawaiian Airlines. Between issues, get the latest news and information via HApeople. Comments and suggestions can be sent to: HA.CorporateCommunications@HawaiianAir.com