This opinion piece by Max Christoffersen in yesterday's Waikato Times is a good read on the rise and fall of Kiwi Regional Airlines.
OPINION: And so Kiwi Regional Airlines has crashed and burned. As the story spread of its demise, it seemed many could not hide their glee about the news. The story broke late on a Friday afternoon, confirming for a second and likely final time that Ewan Wilson would run an airline no more. As I backtracked to understand the news, it appears that Kiwi Regional Airlines was caught in a classic grow-or-go scenario. The airline's commercial future required investment in a second plane, but the ticket demand couldn't sustain the passenger numbers required for the new investment. The airline ran out of lift and stalled. The smaller regional routes abandoned by other airlines were not going to be sustainable on a feel-good factor. It had taken Kiwi Regional Airlines management seven months to confirm what was obvious all along to the big boys. The local airline had no future. It was over. Again. The airline's imported Saab 340a airplane met with a spectacular water cannon greeting at Hamilton airport last September is now gone, sold to Air Chathams. The Stuff headline read: Regional routes lost as Kiwi Regional Airlines folds. As the news gathered prominence in the country's media, I spent much of that afternoon reading through the story and the comments posted by those who felt compelled to make their point public. Some were passengers, some were not. Some were out for blood. And many were public about the airline's short-term future they saw coming all along. There is a lot of turbulence still lingering from passengers who were badly let down in the aftermath of Wilson's first nuts-and-cola airline, Kiwi Air. The vitriol was all over some of the comments. Passengers had not forgotten and never will. This was payback time. The lingering anger of those who were left stranded in Australia and New Zealand is ugly when in full view, but it is, nonetheless, understandable. Some opinions were heated, some informed and some were just sad at the closure of what they saw as the small guy up against the big guy coming undone again. Sifting my way through the reader comments was hard work, but some informed commentators, clearly with aviation experience made some compelling points. If the passengers have not been left behind, if Wilson's staff have been placed in new employment with Air Chathams and the only ones to lose money were the airline shareholders, then this is a carefully controlled belly landing with no public casualties. This is actually a company that had a soft landing and should be admired in the way it has been managed into a takeover from a more established player. Where is the harm? More detail will emerge in the future, but if the scenario is correct, then Kiwi Regional Airlines has been managed professionally into Air Chathams. There is no liquidation of assets or receivers making more money than anyone else. There was always something quite compelling about Wilson's story and I was interested to see if Wilson's return to the air was going to work. This was a real life yarn of redemption, a made-for-TV tale of the local boy who loved flying and loved planes. He loved them so much he started his own airline, twice. And the rest, as they say, is history. His pioneering flights of the mid-1990s changed New Zealand aviation and for a short time made us all believers of the possibility of local entrepreneurship. Just like the V8s that would follow, Kiwi Air was bold thinking based in Hamilton and if successful, it would put Hamilton into a big boys league. In an earlier column about the new venture I wrote that "Wilson has got to get this airline right or be damned for good ... don't fool us twice." There was no halfway point on this story. It was always a case of learn from the past and be better. But within hours of the first flight to Dunedin, Queenstown had been dropped from the route. It was a bad start. Regional routes were always a risk and contingencies have to be in place in the event of plane maintenance or breakdown, and when it did, grounding the airline for four days, it looked too much like Amateur Air Ltd. I had hoped we may see a local fairy tale, an Icarus story of the passionate flyer who crashed and burned, but then recovered to fly again. Wilson got close, but this will not be this story. Instead the legacy will be of a passionate flyer who failed passionately. It remains a story of triumph and tragedy that other local entrepreneurs can learn from. It should be retold and understood by those who may be tempted to try again in the future. His turbulent story may be Wilson's great legacy.
