The parent of go! airlines said yesterday its chief financial officer, Peter Murnane, accidentally erased data relating to a pending court case when he was deleting pornographic material from his work computers.

Hawaiian Airlines is suing Mesa Air Group for allegedly using confidential Hawaiian Airlines business information to launch Mesa's low-cost interisland carrier go! last year.

Hawaiian alleged Murnane —who was placed on a 90-leave by Mesa's board last week — deleted hundreds of pages of computer records that would have shown that Mesa misappropriated the Hawaiian information.

But Mesa says any deletion was not intentional and they have copies of the deleted files.

"He (Murnane) was cruising on adult Web sites," said Mesa attorney Max Blecher in a court hearing yesterday. Murnane was just trying to delete the porn sites, he said.

Blecher added that Mesa has copies. "There was no destruction or spoilation," he said.

Mesa's vice president for legal affairs, Christopher Pappaioanou, testified that he found Murnane trolling for pornography on his office computer. Pappaioanou said he walked by Murnane on a Saturday morning in late 2003 or early 2004 and found X-rated material on his computer screen.

"He had adult content on display," Pappaioanou said.

Murnane was not available for comment, and his attorney, Brook Hart, could not be reached yesterday.

Mesa's pornography argument came on the opening day of a high-stakes trial pitting Hawaiian against Mesa. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Faris, who presided over the hearing, made no ruling yesterday but scheduled further hearings this week and next.

The case could have a significant impact on interisland fares and on the bottom lines of the local carriers.

Hawaiian, the state's largest airline, sued Mesa in February 2006, alleging that Mesa received more than 2,000 pages of confidential financial information about Hawaiian's routes, marketing plans, financial projections and other records when it expressed an interest in acquiring Hawaiian in 2004 while the local carrier was in bankruptcy.

Mesa has denied it used any of Hawaiian's confidential material, saying it relied on publicly available data about Hawaiian and other local carriers when it planned the start of go!.

FARE EFFECTS

Should Mesa prevail in the suit, local consumers may continue to benefit from an airfare war that has seen ticket prices fall by half.

Local carriers, meanwhile, would continue to bleed red ink. During the past 12 months, Aloha Airlines has lost $61 million, and Hawaiian lost $17.6 million. Figures for go! are not available.

If Hawaiian wins the suit, Mesa could be forced to cough up tens of millions of dollars in damages, making it difficult for the company to continue offering cut-rate ticket prices.

Observers were surprised when Mesa's attorney brought up the pornography incident.

"Oh, my god, what can I say, it's clearly a unique legal strategy," said Nick Capuano, managing director and head of equity research at Los Angeles-based Imperial Capital LLC, whose firm covers Hawaiian. "It seems like a desperate legal strategy to me."

Hawaiian attorney Sidney Levinson called the pornography reference "a transparent effort to distract the court's attention and undermine the credibility of one of Mesa's most senior officers."

"You have to wonder why Mesa thinks that smearing their own star witness with allegations of pornography benefits them," Levinson said.

SCEPTICISM EXPRESSED

Hawaiian has previously cited e-mails in which Murnane asked a friend to help delete computer files to make it appear that the files never were on Murnane's computer hard drives. The e-mails were sent about a week after Hawaiian filed its lawsuit against Mesa.

During yesterday's hearing, an Arizona-based computer expert retained by Hawaiian testified that he saw no evidence of pornography on Murnane's computers when he examined them earlier this year.

The expert, Jefford Englander, said that Murnane wiped out the data on two laptop computers and his home PC using special software and that he also backdated the computers' clocks to make it seem like the computers were not tampered with.

He said the amount of information erased was enormous.

"It would take a lot of time to accumulate that much adult content," Englander said.

"I have never seen anyone go to these lengths to erase adult content," Englander said.

Reach Rick Daysog at rdaysog@honoluluadvertiser.com.