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Leaving Honolulu is always done with some reluctance; this is a good home with some of the nation’s best folks.
So if you need cheering up when leaving, consider that the chances are good that wherever you land, the airport you stroll into is going to be between better and amazingly better than the one you left.
Honolulu’s Daniel K. Inouye airport is crowded, dirty, needlessly confusing and remains this way despite decades of promises to do better.
In 1969, one of the creators of Mililani, planner Alfred Boeke, at a Honolulu planning conference called Honolulu’s airport “the lousiest, most inconvenient airport in the United States.”
Fifty years later, the
J.D. Power ranking for
the 30 worst American
airports, puts Honolulu at seventh worse.
This isn’t personal opinion; it comes from a survey of more than 40,000 travelers. “The state really dropped the ball when designing its international airport,” said J.D. Power.
“Although it has excellent scheduling and fewer cancellations, the airport is such a maze that you might not make your flight.
“Any attempts to follow the confusing signage is liable to bring passengers to dead ends and restricted areas.”
The state Department of Transportation (DOT) is finishing up a multimillion-dollar new signage project, which is likely to bring the level of confusion to new peaks.
For instance, while the state has renamed the different areas as Terminal 1 and Terminal 2, the state’s own webpage, in extolling the airport modernization program, throws Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 overboard as it explains the “Mauka Concourse … will be connected to the Interisland Terminal.”
Hawaii and United Airlines are serious best buddies. United has been flying here for 70 years, but just last month, United’s boss said it is time for the airport to get its act together.
“I hate to be overdramatic but we’ve got to fix this. This is the jewel of this island. People love coming here and we’ve got to have an airport that represents it,” said United CEO Oscar Munoz.
A Hawaii News Now report of Munoz’s news conference quoted him saying “ongoing construction and deferred maintenance at the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport is taking away from the visitors’ experience.
“I toured this airport with our team this morning … and literally things are coming off the wall.”
Forced to wander around the unairconditioned airport concourses is one problem, but the bigger worry is how well does Daniel K. Inouye do when the lights go out.
In 2006, when an earthquake hit the Big Island, shockwaves knocked out power in Honolulu.
Then-Gov. Linda Lingle said getting power back up to the airport and sewage treatment plant were her biggest worries. Airlines were canceling flights, passengers were looking to a night in the darkened terminal, sleeping on the floor. Lingle added that the state quickly discovered that those fancy electric-eye toilets don’t flush without power.
So last week, the power again went out at the airport. One terminal turned on the power from a new multimillion-dollar emergency generator system. The other terminal remained in the dark for more than an hour.
There are a lot of hands touching this project: Hawaiian Electric, for instance, has a role in the planning, because it plans to use the airport generator to start its own generators in case of a power failure.
A DOT spokesman said “Hawaiian Electric worked to restore power within three minutes of the initial outage; however, a circuit breaker tripped when power was restored, which impacted Terminal 1. Technicians from Hawaiian Electric were dispatched to the airport and together with DOT engineers they were able to restore the power on site within an hour of the outage.”
As we enter what could be a nasty hurricane season, time’s up on the state and its Transportation Department not having the services or the answers. Not more plans or promises; it is time for Gov. David Ige’s administration to show it can deliver and operate a modern, functioning airport.
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