An early morning power outage at Honolulu International Airport's inter-island terminal caused major delays for Hawaiian Airlines' neighbor island flights.
In all, 75 flights were affected on every island after security doors that provide access to jetways would not open for three hours. State crews were conducting a monthly test of the emergency generator when something went wrong at about 4:30 a.m. Tuesday.
When we were switching power back to our commercial system the breaker, something happened to the breaker it malfunctioned and that's what caused the outage," said Dan Meisenzahl, spokesman for the State Department of Transportation.
The emergency generator immediately kicked in but the system does not power everything in the terminal including doors that require security card keys.
"The doors automatically as soon as there's a loss in power they immediately shut-down and lockdown so they worked exactly how they were supposed to work," said Meisenzahl. "And that means we couldn't open the gates to the jetways to get to the planes."
And that would have an enormous ripple affect on neighbor islands flights.
"We had access to jet-ways starting at about 7:15 this morning so that's full two hours after we started operating so all those first flights were delayed and that has a domino affect throughout the day," said Wagner. Power was fully restored by 7:20 but by then the delays had begun. "We've put on two of our spare aircraft are flying today along with extra crews that we put on first thing to try to help keep up with the schedule."
Passengers were alerted about the delays. And while some were forced to literally run off to their final destinations.
"I'm late I'm late."
Most were grinning and bearing it.
"It is what it is," said Kaimi Chung of Hilo. "You live in Hawaii it's the best place to be in so even though you get a little frustrated like this you know you live in Hawaii."
"They kept us informed and that was good," said Glenn Doi of Oahu. "At least instead of keeping us in the dark and saying in a little while, in a little while like they do on some of the other airlines."
Besides security doors, the emergency generator does not supply power to censored toilets.
"The power goes off and it doesn't work," said Bernie Pila and Joan Antone say no one could flush for three hours.
"They should have it by manual," said Antone.
"Yeah rough morning but we handle," said Pila.
A rough morning for custodians but an even tougher day for passengers.
"Most flights have been delayed about 30 minutes but we've had some extended delays one flight was delayed for two-and-a-half hours," said Wagner.
Hawaiian Airlines caught up with flights by 5 p.m., 13 hours after the power went out.
