Aloha Airlines employees plan reunion to mark 10 years since shutdown

In March, it will be 10 years since Aloha Airlines shut down. This is a story about a reunion being planned for Aloha employees, but also about how the soul of the airline has lived on past the company’s abrupt end.

One of the primary keepers of this story is Billy Remular, who has hundreds of pictures of Aloha’s time in the skies. Remular has loved Aloha Airlines almost all his life.

In 1972, he went with his fourth-grade class on the typical fourth-grade Big Island trip, enjoyed every second of the experience and decided right then what he wanted to do with his life: He wanted to be a teacher and he wanted to work for Aloha Airlines.

For 19 years, Remular did just that, working as a customer service agent for Aloha and running the airline’s Explorers Program, taking high school students through a series of lessons and experiences aimed at giving them a head start in the airline industry.

One of Remular’s first Explorers students is now a captain with Hawaiian Airlines. At the Starbucks near the airport where we met to talk about the reunion, another of Remular’s former students just happened to be sitting at a nearby table. Remular greeted him with a hug.

The young man said he’s studying to be a pilot. Remular hugged him again.

“Aloha was our airline,” Remular said. “The employees, we were the company. We loved our passengers. We were a family.”

Crissie Gilkey is also part of the committee planning the reunion. She was a flight attendant for Aloha for 31 years.

She now works for Hawaiian, preferring to work the red-eye flight to Las Vegas.

“I like seeing so many of my former Aloha passengers on that flight,” she said. “It’s lots of Hawaii residents, lots of wheelchair passengers, lots of oxygen tanks and medical concerns. … People ask if I work the Vegas flight because I like to gamble, but I don’t gamble. I just enjoy that flight.”

Aloha Airlines’ last day of service was March 31, 2008. After 61 years of business, the company, with 3,500 employees, could not withstand predatory pricing by a new airline and the onslaught of the recession.

“None of us saw it coming,” Gilkey said.

“We knew Sunday morning that the airline would be shutting down on Monday,” said Hope Garo, who worked in the claims department of Aloha Airlines for 13 years, dealing with irate passengers complaining that their bags didn’t arrive when they did. Garo loved the challenge of trying to help them.

In August 2008, remaining inventory from the airline was auctioned. Everything, even things like pallets of plastic logo cups used for in-flight beverage service, was in a big warehouse.

The employees were allowed to bid first. “All of us pooled our money together and tried to buy as much as we could,” Garo said. They kept these things like family heirlooms.

Chris Opiopio, who worked in reservations and customer service for 30 years, said that before she moved house, she had an entire room in her home full of Aloha memorabilia. Gilkey has photos and flight schedules organized in albums. Garo says her Aloha uniform is still hanging in her closet.

Remular started documenting Aloha employees at work well before the shutdown was announced, and he has maintained a website for more than 10 years that serves as a hub of Aloha employee information and memories.

There have been other Aloha reunions. Some years it’s just a hundred or so former co-workers getting together at Ige’s 19th Puka. One year after the airline folded, 2,300 employees met to commiserate.

“There’s no such thing as closure,” Opiopio said. “It will never be behind us.”

Gilkey said: “There’s one Aloha employee who wears a gold Hawaiian bracelet as big as a tuna can that has an Aloha plane enameled on it. She already bought six tickets to the reunion.”

In a photo album, Gilkey has a picture of another employee who had the image of an Aloha plane tattooed on her thigh. The photo shows only the tattoo and the thigh, and not the person’s face, and Gilkey can’t remember who it was. They joke that this could lead to a contest at the reunion.

The event is planned for March 31, marking 10 years to the day that Aloha shut down. There will be heavy pupus, a program and entertainment.

“Really, we just want to see each other,” Garo said. “We don’t care much about the entertainment.”

They remember all the construction workers who traveled to the neighbor islands for work every day. Students who caught a plane instead of a bus to come to school on Oahu. People who traveled to Honolulu for medical treatment. The Honolulu bus driver who lived in Hilo but would fly in to work in the morning and back to the Big Island every night.

“She would say, ‘Put me in the middle of the plane. I brought pupus to share. We’re having a party!’ So we did and she did,” Gilkey said.

Opiopio worked for Mokulele Airlines for a while but has since retired. Garo works for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, tracking lost people instead of lost luggage. Remular works for Hawaiian Airlines, where he also volunteers to run their youth training program. He also teaches Hawaiian studies at Pearl City Elementary. He tries to work the word “Aloha” into most conversations.

“We served. We loved our passengers,” Remular said. “We knew them by their first names. They knew our kids. We reserved their favorite seats for them even though it was open seating. That’s Aloha. We were all a family.”

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.