Lee Cataluna: Measures for flying too new to be routine

Remember when airlines started flying again after Sept. 11, 2001, and just traveling between the islands took on a whole new level of seriousness, security and bureaucracy? Who would have ever thought that interisland travel would get even more complicated than that?

There was a time when you could decide at a breakfast meeting in downtown Honolulu to hop on a plane to Lihue for lunch, and you could do it without temperature checks or forms to fill out or full-body scans or even reservations. Tickets for a one-way interisland flight were as low as $45 if purchased as part of an Aloha Airlines “Akamai Coupon Book” of six one-way tickets. Hawaiian Airlines offered a similar coupon book deal, $275 for a book of five tickets, which could be ordered by mail or purchased through a travel agent or at the counter at the airport, where there may be a line, but nothing more than a few minutes — certainly nothing as serpentine and crazy as the lines we’ve gotten used to at airports these days. All it took to get on a flight was tearing out a coupon, writing your name, the date, time and flight number in the proper spaces and showing up in enough time to run from the parking lot to the gate. Fifteen minutes before liftoff was plenty of time.

No one who was an adult in the ’90s could foresee how quaint and simple those days would someday seem. All that ticket-tearing and flying back and forth between islands on day trips actually felt busy and hectic and modern at the time. It’s only looking back that makes it seem breezy and carefree, in that era before all the security measures that came down after 9/11, before all the health and safety precautions for COVID-19, before 10 million tourists a year.

At this moment traveling to a neighbor island requires a significant commitment. Though the 14-day quarantine for interisland travelers is pau, just getting on a plane requires the forethought and preparation of astronauts on an old Apollo mission. The process has all been thoughtfully choreographed at the airport to account for social distancing, but on top of that are the temperature checks with those no-contact infrared thermometers that look a bit too much like guns. Also, there is the questionnaire that must be filled out by each passenger no more than 24 hours before flight time with questions like, “Have you taken medicine to bring down fever?” and “Were you ever in contact with a person confirmed to have COVID-19?” which relies on the honest disclosure of the traveler.

There’s not much traction for complaining about any of this. These measures are what the current pandemic requires of a community that wants to stay healthy. There are probably more safeguards that should be put in place that haven’t been thought of yet that could become standard procedure in the future.

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