Love’s Bakery, thrown into a tailspin by the sudden shutdown of Aloha Airlines’ cargo unit, is going the distance to make sure its customers on the Big Island and Kaua’i get their baked goods.

After learning that Aloha wouldn’t be flying cargo last night and not having other options for interisland cargo flights, Love’s made arrangements with Surefire Consulting to ship the baked goods on flights to Los Angeles where they could be loaded back on to other commercial passenger planes headed directly to Neighbor Island airports.

“They (Aloha) just left us high and dry,” said Mike Walters, president of Love’s Bakery, the biggest customer of the cargo operation.

“This came as a complete surprise to us because we were assured for the last month that they had a contingency plan.”

Walters wasn’t the only one scrambling yesterday after word began filtering around Honolulu that Aloha, the state’s biggest air cargo carrier, was shutting down immediately after unsuccessful attempts to sell the freight business in bankruptcy proceedings.

Shippers yesterday bemoaned being blindsided by the unexpected shuttering as they worked to put contingency plans in place. Aloha’s six cargo aircraft carried an estimated 85 percent of non-postal service air cargo shipments, typically ferrying time-sensitive goods back and forth between Honolulu and the Neighbor Islands.

Love’s was Aloha’s biggest customer, shipping an average of 36,000 pounds of baked goods daily. Aloha also carried the bulk of mail sent between the Big Island, Maui and Honolulu. Another smaller carrier also delivers mail, including to Kaua’i. Late yesterday the U.S. Postal Service said it was hoping to put its emergency plans into place seamlessly so that customers would not notice a service disruption.

Read more …

(Source: Greg Wiles, Honolulu Advertiser)

Also …

Baker rises to occasion, ships stranded loaves via SFO