My understanding is that the CSAs granted the company a waiver in their last contract so they could contract out Hawaii ops. Management's position back in 2007 and 2008 was that the service was very new and they weren't sure how it would perform...so why spend a lot of money relocating agents to Hawaii. Well, it's 2011 now and we've seen just how much AS has grown in the islands (BTW...SEA-HNL is up to 3x daily starting late December) and the company is very profitable.

A less credible rumor is that Horizon is looking at inter-island service with some of the Q400s. That would be very interesting...