Sunday was more than just a tough day for nearly 2,000 Aloha Airlines’ employees. They are left with a lot of questions and I’m sure a lot of frustration.
I received the news as I drove to the store to get some cough syrup for my wife who has a bad cold. My 9-month-old son is pretty sick, too. The KITV weekend assignment manager/reporter Shayne Enright called to say Aloha was shutting down its passenger flights.
It was a bit of a shock. I had to make it to the store, so Shayne teamed up with the national part of our company that helps out on the weekends and sometimes at night. They did a pretty good job of getting the details up before I got home.
(side note: While I’m the managing editor of news for KITV.com, I am actually not employed by KITV. I work for Internet Broadcasting Inc. based in St. Paul, Minnesota. KITV’s parent company, Hearst-Argyle TV, mostly owned by Hearst Corp., is an investor in IB. They contracted IB to set up sites for all of Hearst’s TV stations. IB also serves NBC, McGraw-Hill, Post-Newsweek, Cox, Meredith and several others.)
I got back to my house and jumped on the computer. I checked my e-mail to find a plethora of notes from Aloha, Hawaiian-Air, Hawaii Tourism Authority, hotels and more responding to Aloha’s shutdown.
Working from home can be a blessing and a curse. It’s great to be able to be home, but it’s tough when your crying infant son wants you to carry him while trying to get the details of a major breaking news story onto the site for people to have access to.
I had to make a couple of calls back and forth to KITV. The team helped me a lot with information and scripts. Our Associate Producer Nate was solid in getting up video of our coverage and sending me tons of information.
While covering a story, as I’ve detailed here, you get caught up in what needs to be done. It usually isn’t until later that you really get a chance to let the human element hit you. You know about it when you cover it and you make sure to let viewers hear the stories of the people hurt by such a thing as the shutdown. Sometimes you look back at the story and find so much more in it.
1,900 people losing jobs is crazy, but take that apart and look at the 1,900 lives it affects.
One of the interviews Dick Allgire had in his report was from a man who worked at the company for 35 years. He said it was 85 percent of his life. How do you go from something you’ve done for 35 years to something else completely new? Perhaps this man, Joe Kauweloa, will find a job doing the same thing at another airline. It still will be life-changing.
I feel terrible for these people, and it won’t just affect them, it’s going to impact the state.
I sit here writing stories and then I guess at 12:30 a.m., with my wife asleep and my son getting up occasionally because of his cough, I get caught up with the same thing people all over the state are thinking. What if it happens to me?
- Brent Suyama
