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Posted on: Sunday, July 2, 2006

Hawaiian Airlines

By Mike Gordon
Advertiser Staff Writer

The Douglas DC-3, in civilian uniform, was a familiar sight in Island skies for two decades, flown by both Hawaiian and Aloha Airlines. In those days, virtually every Islander who flew had ridden aboard one. Advertiser library photo

To convince the public that inter-island air travel was safe and that his planes were durable enough to make flights over Hawaiian waters, Stanley C. Kennedy ordered his new fleet of Douglas DC-3 airplanes to be flown from the Mainland to Hawai'i in 1941.

It was the longest open-water flight ever made by the twin-engine aircraft and marked the debut of the company's new name, which was painted broadly on each fuselage: Hawaiian Airlines.

Kennedy had created the company in 1929. Inter-Island Airways offered scheduled air service to a skeptical public that felt safer sailing on ships.

Aside from the dent in one of the airplanes when a champagne bottle refused to shatter during christening before the inaugural flight, the airline's first trip to Hilo was smooth, historic and 3 hours and 15 minutes long.

The first aircraft were Sikorsky S-38 amphibious airplanes that could take off and land on water or land. That was especially convenient, since many airfields at the time were of poor quality and prone to flooding.

Air travel was a tough sell at first. But after two years, the planes had logged considerable passenger mileage: 431,345 miles.

The new DC-3s came under attack in December, but not by the flying public. During the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, a DC-3 was strafed, and the cockpit caught fire.

But a stray bullet struck the cockpit fire extinguisher, causing it to put out the fire. The incident was reported in "Ripley's Believe It Or Not."

Scheduled air cargo service began in World War II when Moloka'i rancher Paul Fagan was unable to find shipping in January 1942. Fagan charted a Hawaiian Sikorsky S-43 to fly his beef to Honolulu and come back with fresh vegetables. It was the first scheduled air cargo service in the nation. By 1954, the airline was carrying 20 million pounds of cargo a year.