Say Aloha to your Airline ticket money

Bad news in paradise. Both Aloha Airlines and ATA went bankrupt in one week taking over a half million visitors away from the isle, but worse for us the companies stole our travel dollars. Thousands of people we left holding tickets that are now worthless like Kimberlie Gamino who flies in specialists for a camp for children with serious heart problems in Mokule'ia. She lost $9000. Or the people who raised thousands of dollars to fly Special Olympics contenders on Aloha Airlines like Carey Uchida who not only lost thousands of dollars in tickets, but hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles to be used for the Special Olympics. But the real victims in this corporate binge are the workers like Harry Shupe only 2 years away from retirement after a 38 year career at Aloha. At the head of the table is Aloha's CEO David Banmiller who during the bankruptcy hearings of 2005 was able to negotiate with the courts to allow him a multimillion dollar compensation package. You think that the courts will give Harry even a tenth of that? Or let him be eaten? Subodh Karnik, ATA's CEO, dodged out only weeks before the company went belly up, taking his chunk of salary with him and then John Denison who first got ATA in bad straights while making almost a half a million a year stepped back in and drove the stake through the heart. These guys are amateur airline cannibals compared to Glenn Tilton who collected over $8 million while driving United Airlines into bankruptcy. But the king cannibal of the air is Gordon Bethune, CEO of Continental Airlines, who took $22 million from the company on his way out while underfunding the company's pension fund by $1.58 billion