The superferry was canned because of lobbying by airlines and car rental companies.
Currently, the only way to travel between the islands is by actual airplanes, through airports, with all the annoyances that comes with that, TSA, security, bag checks, prohibited items, and a gazillion other rules. That's what this thing will compete against, and it's pretty much a slam dunk.
Unless it will be lobbied to death like the predecessors.
Though aside from Honolulu (I assume, haven't been there specifically), most of the airports in Hawaii are pretty small, laid-back affairs. They're really not a big deal to fly in and out of.
There were also a lot of environmental protests against the Superferry that I doubt can all be chalked up to car rental and airline lobbying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Superferry
TSA afaik isn't even required for intrastate flights as intrastate travel isn't fed jurisdiction. In Alaska they don't even metal detect for weapons intrastate last time I flew.
If they're keeping TSA for intrastate flightd it's just as a fed funded voluntary jobs program for low IQ undereducated people to not have to rely on state welfare .
Your elitist commentary aside. The issue is probably more that at small Hawaii airports that have both service back to the mainland and inter-island flights, they just don't bother to separate the two pools of passengers.
I have done an inter-island flight from smaller small prop plane terminal in Kona adjacent to the main (but still small) terminal and I'm guessing I didn't have a security screening in that case.
As with many ferries, the Superferry could let you bring your vehicle with you on the trip. The rental car companies would care because that would reduce their business as many locations in Hawaii are best accessible via private vehicle.
its a ground effect plane - they can be a bit more efficient vs traditional ferries and airplanes especially in a role were it just relatively short hops between islands.
Also since its effectively float-able by design it has the potential to be very safe even if its propulsion breaks during the trip. you could just send another plane to take the passengers off then take the broken plane home pulled by a ship. This capability should be designed in.
The limited trip length might even lend itself to concepts that are fully or partially battery powered.
one downside is that the plane might not be able to be used in rougher weather.
Can a ground effect plane really be more efficient than a ferry or a hyperfoil? It just seems like a boat that can carry cargo etc would be useful infrastructure instead of a fast taxi service. Pour que no los dos perhaps...
To be clear, what I read about the ferry service being shut down made it sound like Hawaii has some dysfunction preventing good and normal things from happening, just sounds like this would be less feasible
Efficiency is not the only metric here. Water has a lot of friction. That's why boats are relatively slow and use a lot of fuel or electricity. A ferry with hundreds of miles range would need a huge battery. With distances between islands being tens to hundreds of miles (depending on the route), the speed also matters. For cargo that matters less obviously.
This thing is electric and flies over the water. So it uses way less power per mile than if it was a boat in the water. And likewise because it flies in ground effect, it has an advantage over electrical planes as well. Hydrofoils might be close enough but still use more power and are probably also a lot slower.
The cost of the electricity is less of a concern here since electricity is cheap. The main efficiency related concern is the impact it has on range as batteries are expensive and heavy. Distances in Hawaii are not enormous but long enough that you'd have to worry about this. So, given that this thing has the needed range, it should be quite attractive as an alternative to planes. Cheaper and cleaner to operate (presumably) and quick enough that the difference doesn't matter. And a lot faster than ferries or hydrofoils.
I lived there right as the superferry got announced/released. Then in the same time span, almost overnight, it was shut down. Absolutely insane. It was a great solution.
The fact that you could bring your car to another island was epic. These planes cannot do that.
Wrong kind of environmental concerns from what locals have told me. The issues were more about increased traffic from Oahu to the less populated islands and people taking things that have been made more or less extinct on Oahu like opihi or the lava rocks used for cooking kalua pig.
The GP's post tracks with my recollection from the time. On the return leg of one of the very first trips to Maui three pickup trucks were found with beds full of lava rock, allegedly collected without permission or permits. This was the inciting incident that seemed to confirm the neighbor islands' residents fears that the Superferry would lead to plundering of cultural resources en masse (not to mention making existing overcrowding worse). On a subsequent trip to kauai a large number of protestors (or protectors I suppose, depending on your view) paddled out on surfboards and blocked the ferry's path at Nawiliwili.
The rocks weren't the direct cause of the Superferry shutting down, but in my recollection they sure charted the course that way: people who might have seemed to some like they were just fighting change to fight change suddenly had irrefutable evidence to confirm their fears. There were of course other legal challenges that actually led to the shutdown, bankruptcy, and subsequent abandonment of the vessels. But at the time, on the neighbor islands, it sure crystalized the opposition.
> The Hawaii Superferry started service in 2007 but only lasted until 2009 after the state Supreme Court ruled that a law allowing it to operate without a second complete environmental study was unconstitutional.
A lot of the outer island folks loved it. I did. I lived on Maui at the time.
So then the question becomes: does a theoretical "boat with electric motor" succeed more or less with energy efficiency. I say theoretical, but I feel like you could take any ferry and replace the motor with an electric one? Maybe that's not true.
