Alaska Likes What it Sees at Hawaiian
The company has had full control for more than four months. It told investors it has seen no surprises. That's a good thing.
Dear readers, no one covers aviation safety as adeptly as Jon Ostrower, editor-in-chief of The Air Current and my co-host on The Air Show. I’m following his reporting — and I recommend you do too — about the tragic collision at DCA.
The annals of business combinations are filled with examples of due diligence gone bad, when executives realize they acquired worse problems than they expected.
But roughly four months after completing their acquisition of Hawaiian, Alaska’s top executives say they’ve yet to uncover anything concerning. Perhaps they got lucky, or maybe they deserve credit — CFO Shane Tackett said Alaska spent even more time and effort preparing for this acquisition than the Virgin America deal.1 Either way, they said, the news is good.
"We went through this before with Virgin America, so we were experienced at what to look for," CEO Ben Minicucci said. "There is nothing coming at us. In fact, I would just say the opposite. It feels like it's better than what we had thought. Things are getting stronger."
It's early to declare complete victory, and Minicucci warned that "there's a few more layers of the onion that need to be peeled off," but there are signs that this could be one of the more fruitful acquisitions in recent U.S. airline history. And that’s something that’s becoming apparent even before Alaska has made real changes to the Hawaiian operation. Most of the big network shifts come later this year.2