Trolley Line

Almost every 15 minutes from dawn to dusk a DC-3 takes off from or lands at Honolulu Airport for a flight around the islands. Businessmen fly from one island to another for lunch; housewives fly into Honolulu to shop; planters commute by air between farms and cities. Islanders call Hawaiian Airlines, Ltd. the "trolley line." Next week Hawaiian Airlines, with two more DC-3s added to its fleet of eight, will step up its flights from 50 to 60 a day.

Though it is one of the smallest airlines under Civil Aeronautics Board supervision (the terminal points of its network covering the six main islands are only 350 miles apart), Hawaiian Airlines' trolley tactics have made it one of the most consistent moneymakers among U.S. lines. It has been in the black all but one of the last 14 years, and last year earned $186,469 on a gross of $3,353,910. It is also one of the safest lines under CAB, having carried 1,300,000 passengers 200,000,000 miles without a fatality.

War & Nuts. The man who made the seagoing islanders among the most airminded people in the world is Stanley C. Kennedy, 58, the island-born, Stanford-educated president of the line. When he came home from World War I service as a Navy flyer, Stan Kennedy tried to get his father's Inter-Island Steam Navigation Co., for years the only inter-island freight and passenger carrier, to start an airline. Instead of 15 hours from Honolulu to Hilo, he argued, it would take only a few hours. Old James Kennedy, a hypercautious Scotsman, said nothing doing.

After his father retired, Stan got Inter-Island to give planes a try. He started in November 1929 with two eight-passenger Sikorsky Amphibions. In 1941 Hawaiian bought three Douglas DC-3s, just in time to cash in on war traffic. All Inter-Island's passenger boats were put into troop service, so civilians had to use Hawaiian Airlines to get from island to island. Hawaiian also flew food from outlying ranches into Honolulu, and when Hilo's main laundry closed down (TIME, May 12, 1947), provided two-day service from a laundry on the island of Maui.

Now the line carries tons of freight a day, in addition to some 900 passengers. A typical day's haul: newspapers, nuts, 2,500

lbs. of mixed vegetables, 8,000 Ibs. of fresh fish and meat, 36,000 Ibs. of lettuce. One result: Inter-Island's boats are now out of business except for heavy shipping and an occasional junket for honeymooners.

Weather & Orchids. For his safety record, Stan Kennedy thanks the weather (usually perfect for flying) and a heavy emphasis on maintenance, which works so smoothly that planes are often "turned around" at airports in five minutes. Moreover, his 54 pilots, most of them hand-picked war veterans headed by ex-Navy man Charles I. Elliott, know their routes as well as motormen. (One of them breaks the monotony of the same old daily run by scattering orchid seeds from his plane.)

With canny Scottish sense, Kennedy has shied from the lure of fancy new equipment. "We could have transferred to bigger, 40-passenger planes," says he, "but it would have increased the operating costs to a point where we'd have been forced to cut down schedules." He thinks the moneymaking trick for short lines is to have plenty of schedules--and keep them.

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